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COLLEGE 

AND 

COMMONWEALTH 



COLLEGE 

AND 

COMMONWEALTH 



AND OTHER EDUCATIONAL 
PAPERS AND ADDRESSES 



BY 

JOHN HENRY MacCRACKEN, LL.D. 

President of Lafayette College 




I 

i; 



NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

19S0 






.H 



Copyright, 1920, by 
The Centxjby Co. 




jtC iOiS20 
©C!.Ae04548 



CONTENTS 



I 

II 

III 

IV 

V 

VI 

VII 

VIII 

IX 

X 

XI 

XII 

XIII 

XIV 

XV 

XVI 

XVII 

XVIII 

XIX 



College ajstd Commonwealth 
The College and the Individual 
The College of Growth 
Liberty and Cooperation . 
Arms and Archimedes 
War and Education . 
Education for the New Era 



1 

21 
42 
58 
81 
95 
112 



The College and the Shadow of War 120 

Pooling of College Interests as a War 
Measure 129 

Federal Leadership in Education . . 146 

A National Department of Education 162 

Why the Trust Idea Is not Applicable 
TO Education 168 

Defining the College Man .... 184 

The College Man and Freedom . . 203 

The American College of To-Day . , 214 

Business Side of College Administra- 
tion 236 

College Fellowship 257 

The College President 265 

The Education of Women .... 275 



Contents 

CHAPTER \. PAGE 

XX Broader Education of Engineers . . 288 

XXI Educational Research 295 

XXII Education for Business 305 

XXIII A Graduate School for the Metrop- 

olis 313 

XXIV Scientific Method and Therapeutic 

Impulse 330 

XXV Fraternity Ideals 336 

XXVI Dedication of Baker Hall .... 341 

XXVII Religion and Education 351 

XXVIII The Forward Looking Presbyterian . 358 

XXIX The Religious Element in Education 

— A Necessity 373 

XXX The Christian College . . . . . 385 

XXXI A New Westminster 396 

XXXII George Taylor — Patriot .... 405 

XXXIII The Lesson of Valley Forge . . . 413 



COLLEGE 

AND 

COMMONWEALTH 



COLLEGE AND COMMONWEALTH 

COMING in this second year of world war, to 
a college founded largely by the efforts of a 
great American Secretary of War, who wrote into 
its original charter specific mention of military 
tactics as a subject of instruction; to a college 
whose seal bears the epaulet of a great soldier of 
freedom (with a somewhat contradictory legend — 
Veritas liherabit) ; to a college whose name is that 
of a great Frenchman, beloved of Washington and 
remembered by the American people as General 
Lafayette rather than as the marquis of high line- 
age, as statesman or as reformer ; to a college situ- 
ated in this narrow valley which resounds day and 
night with the straining, agonizing efforts of lo- 
comotives, to set forward on their way of destruc- 
tion tons of shells and projectiles, it might be ex- 
pected that I should speak of education for war, 
or appraise the place of the college in a civilization 
where the steel shell seems final arbiter and the 
scholar's position no whit different from that of 
Archimedes in Syracuse twenty-two centuries ago, 
whose scholar's boast, "Give me where I may 
stand and I will move the world," was quickly 
brought to naught by the ignorant soldier of Mar- 
cellus. 



Inaugural address as President of Lafayette College, October 
20, 1915. 

1 



College and Commonwealth 

But the time is not yet ripe for such appraise- 
ment, nor can the still, small voice of God be 
heard until the rock-blasting winds, the earthquake 
and the fires have passed. The times are too much 
out of joint, passion still too rampant in porch 
and grove to attempt at this time the answer to 
that cry which finds echo in all our hearts to-day, 
''Who will build the city of our dream, where 
beauty shall abound and truth avail, with patient 
love that is too wise for strife ; who now will speed 
us to its gate of peace and reassure us on our 
doubtful road?" 

I limit myself, therefore, to the topic of college 
and commonwealth, since in Pennsylvania, as in 
Massachusetts, this term has been preserved and 
used to designate a society which is supreme in 
all matters except the right to make war, to coin 
money, to maintain a postal service, to control 
commerce beyond its borders and such other mat- 
ters of inter-state concern as have been relin- 
quished for the general welfare under articles of 
federation or a constitution. I use the term in 
this sense to-day, thus excluding from considera- 
tion all matters of war and peace, all matters which 
are, or some day will be, subjects of international 
agreement. 

I do not use "commonwealth" with reference 
to the commonwealth of Pennsylvania alone. The 
gods of education are not local deities. Our view 
across state lines is as uninterrupted as the view 
from yonder window over the Pennsylvania 
boundary to the hills of New Jersey. The com- 



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College and Commonwealth 

monwealth of letters has no distinctive color on 
the map, nor can you learn from any geography 
its boundaries. As the wind bloweth where it 
listeth, and thou canst not tell whence it cometh 
or whither it goeth, so of our common intellectual 
heritage, so of new discoveries in the world of 
learning, any attempt to shut them up to this or 
that class, color, creed or country, is doomed to 
fail. 

Thomas Hobbes, when he wrote his *' Levia- 
than," divided it into four parts — the first part, 
*'0f Man," the second part, "Of Common- 
wealth," the third part, ''Of Christian Common- 
wealth," the fourth part, ''Of the Kingdom of 
Darkness." They would make four excellent sub- 
heads for the inaugural discourse of a college 
president. Time will not permit me, however, to 
begin as Hobbes began, by discussing the thoughts 
of man first singly and then in train, and, as I do 
not wish these remarks to grow into a Leviathan, 
I shall not attempt to discuss either the "Chris- 
tian Commonwealth" or the "Kingdom of Dark- 
ness." I shall speak only of common wealth and 
of that very important item of our common wealth 
and common life, the American college. 

I Horace Bushnell, who spoke at Yale nearly four 
score years ago on "The True Wealth or Weal 
of Nations," said, "What, then, it is time for us 
to ask, is that wealth of a nation which includes 
its weal or solid well-being? that which is the end 
of all genuine policy and all true statesmanship? 
It consists, I answer, in the total value of the per- 

3 



College and Commonwealth 

sons of the people. National wealth is personal, 
not material. It includes the natural capacity, the 
skill, the science, the bravery, the loyalty, the 
moral and religious worth of the people. The 
wealth of a nation is in the breasts of its sons." 
This creed and its corollary as phrased by Wash- 
ington, "Promote, therefore, as an object of pri- 
mary concern the means of education, ' ' is the rock 
upon which our repubhc is builded. The commis- 
sion given its government by the people of the 
commonwealth of Massachusetts in their first state 
constitution has been reiterated with greater or 
less emphasis in all our commonwealths. *'It 
shall be the duty of all legislators and magistrates 
in all future periods of this commonwealth to 
cherish the interests of literature and all semin- 
aries of them, especially the University at Cam- 
bridge, public schools and grammar schools in the 
towns," and nobly have the states fulfilled their 
commission.: To-day in a commonwealth where 
the people have raised a schoolmaster to the office 
of chief magistrate of the commonwealth, in a na- 
tion where the people have raised a schoolmaster 
to the office of chief magistrate of the nation, there 
is little danger that education will be assigned any 
less important a place in the polity of the state. 
In the State of New York the past summer the 
constitutional convention gave much time to an 
attempt to define the relation of the state to educa- 
tion. Decisions of the courts had clearly estab- 
lished the authority of the state in educational 
matters, but when an attempt was made to reduce 

4 



College and Commonwealth 

established practice to a theorem and to state it 
in definite terms, it was fomid impossible to find 
the right words and the conclusion of the whole 
matter was that what it was proposed to say was 
better left to the unwritten constitution. To write 
' ' education is a state function, ' ' it was pointed out, 
is either to say what does not need saying, or to 
say too much. The discussion in the convention 
indicated, however, not only that the American 
people are not all of one mind, but also that the 
American people as a whole have not as yet given 
this important subject that searching and far- 
reaching critical examination which it deserves. 
No one questions that education is a function of 
the state ; no one questions that the state may con- 
trol the chartering of colleges and universities and 
prescribe the conditions under which degrees are 
to be given, but many question whether education 
should be exclusively a state function, while the 
great majority have never even considered where 
state control of education should stop and the free- 
dom of private teaching begin. Constitutions and 
constitution writers are better at negative state- 
ments than at positive ones and this is as it should 
be. Constitutions are not intended to express the 
public's beliefs and ideals, though the creeds of 
commonwealths, like the creeds of individuals, may 
be guessed from their denials. Constitutions are 
the law addressed to the people's representatives, 
the thou shalt nots, rather than the gospel of hopes 
and desires. It is easier to write ''Congress shall 
make no law regarding the establishment of reli- 

5 



College and Commonwealth 

gion," than it is to prepare a program to make 
American boys and girls disciplined, responsible, 
high-minded, aspiring men and women. It is 
easier to write, ''The state shall teach," than to 
say what and how, when and where, and whom 
the state shall teach, and who else shall teach. 

Beginning as we did with a narrow view of the 
field of government, concerned for freedom from 
interference with the individual, rather than for 
efficiency of achievement, we have been gradually 
expanding our conception of the proper activities 
of government, until the old sense of individual 
responsibility, the readiness to organize volun- 
tary associations to accomplish ajiy good desired 
by a considerable number and to pay the bills of 
such undertakings out of the private purse, seem 
in danger of being lost in the emphasis laid upon 
governmental activity and in the readiness to shift 
to the shoulder of the taxpayer the cost of tasks 
which may or may not have his interest or assent. 
On the one hand we can not view without concern 
this apparent diminution of individual initiative 
and of readiness to sacrifice for the public weal 
on the part of the individual, and, on the other 
hand, we must disapprove manifestations of a 
greedy bureaucratic spirit which would limit serv- 
ice for the commonwealth to the activities of gov- 
ernment. There are abroad to-day political philo- 
sophers, who, like the pantheistic philosophers in 
religion, are restless and bewildered in a multi- 
form world and who would force an arbitrary 
unity. The pantheistic philosopher avoids confu- 

6 



College and Commonwealth 

sion by asserting all is God. The bureaucratic 
philosopher would organize all activities of society 
as activities of government, and say it is simpler 
and more efficient for the state to be the only agent 
of the popular will. As a rule the sociology of 
these philosophers is so narrow that they know 
no men in whom the real reason for acts purport- 
ing to be acts springing from a sense of duty or 
from natural benevolence is not either love of gain 
or love of fame or love of power. They mistrust 
without a hearing any financial relation between 
the state treasury and voluntary enterprises. In 
New York they even questioned at the constitu- 
tional convention the exemption of voluntary col- 
leges and voluntary churches from taxation. 
They not only contend for government ownership 
of express companies, railroads and telephones, 
but regard the altruism of the carrier on the rural 
free delivery route as more orthodox than that of 
the circuit rider and confound the government pay 
roll with the angel's list of those who, like Abou, 
love their fellow-men. They have replaced the 
outworn creed, *'the King can do no wrong," with 
the modern extremely socialistic doctrine, no one 
can do right, unless he be in the pay and wear 
the uniform of the state. Much, I admit, is to 
be said for the Greek ideal of the commonwealth, 
founded that we may live and continued that we 
may live well, a moral personality, undertaking 
whatever shall make its citizens better and hap- 
pier. It is an ideal, however, possible only in a 
far more homogeneous population than any mod- 

7 



College and Commonwealth 

ern republic has yet possessed. If all had been 
saints or all sinners in New England theocracies, 
the concern for the moral well being of the whole 
community on the part of the local government 
would have proven less irksome. President Low- 
ell, of Harvard, has pointed out clearly in his book 
on "Public Opinion and Popular Government" 
that government by public opinion can not survive 
if the opinion of the majority imposes government 
in a field in which no true public opinion exists ; 
that is, in a field where the people as a whole are 
not united in a conviction that it is properly a 
field of government. Various reasons may oper- 
ate to restrict the field of government, in a gov- 
ernment whose functions are restricted to the 
fields in which a true public opinion exists. It 
was not the intention of the American people, for 
example, in excluding religion from the field of 
government, that this should be an irreligious peo- 
ple. It was not in the minds of our constitution 
makers that religion was socially unimportant or 
that it was one of those luxuries which the plain 
man could spare. It was not the intention to di- 
minish activity in religion, but, rather, to furnish 
greater opportunity for its free exercise. It was 
the thought of our fathers that some of the most 
important functions of society could not be per- 
formed by the state. The foreign visitor, there- 
fore, who judges the American people by their 
governments, knows only a part of their life, and 
the immigrant accustomed to the fostering care 
of paternalistic government, who thinks first of 

8 



College and Commonwealth 

government as the supplier of his needs and 
righter of his wrongs, has not entered into full 
consciousness of the freedom for individual initia- 
tive and for voluntary association with which the 
republic endows her children. The striking char- 
acteristic of the American of to-day is the presence 
in every part of our country of countless volun- 
tary organizations for every purpose under the 
sun. This tendency has undoubtedly been carried 
to an extreme, but it has made of our nation a na- 
tion of self-reliant men willing to back their words, 
like the knights of the days of chivalry, not with 
the sword indeed, but with their check books. 
This spirit of voluntaryism has given us in the 
field of education not only state schools and uni- 
versities, but voluntary schools and colleges, 
founded and maintained either by religious de- 
nominations as a part of their contribution to the 
enlightenment of men and women, or by men and 
women of large wealth, ready in our democracy, 
no less than the kings and noblemen of monarchies, 
to be patrons of literature and science. And, as 
we look out over America to-day and view the re- 
sults of this individualistic effort side by side with 
the efforts of organized government, the candid 
observer must agree that the result is eminently 
good and must hope that this, as well as other vir- 
tues of frontiersmen, will not be lost in an older 
civilization. 

The college to whose service you have called me 
to-day is the product of such voluntary effort. 
The citizens of Easton who secured the original 

9 



College and Commonwealth 

charter in 1826 hoped for the adoption of the col- 
lege by the state, made provision in the charter for 
visitation by the governor (so that the presence 
of Grovernor Brumbangh to-day is entirely consti- 
tutional) and were even successful in securing one 
small appropriation from the state treasury in the 
early thirties for a school of education. The 
hopes of the founders were, however, not realized 
and after twenty years of struggle they turned to 
the Presbyterian Church as the organization best 
able to lend the college additional patronage and 
financial support. This arrangement was rather 
disappointing in its financial result, but very bene- 
ficial in that it defined the character of the college, 
gave it a star to steer by and helped it to grow to 
manhood with fixed principles and ideas. What it 
possesses to-day has come to it largely as the re- 
sult of the efforts of a few consecrated individuals 
and from the gratitude of that splendid company 
of sons which it has itself raised up. It stands 
to-day as a type of the voluntary college, in official 
and sympathetic relation with a great church, pre- 
pared to serve the commonwealth. Are such col- 
leges an asset of the commonwealth! Are they 
worth what they cost? Is there to continue to be 
a place for them in our American scheme of educa- 
tion? Not we of Lafayette alone, but all who are 
interested in voluntary foundations in education 
and elsewhere, are concerned to know whether the 
American scheme of education is to make provi- 
sion for the continuation of such foundations, or 
whether, after the analogj^ of so many undertak- 

10 



College and Commonwealth 

ings in our republic, the experiment having been 
made by voluntary enterprise, the need demon- 
strated and successful methods proved, the burden 
as it becomes a little irksome is to be shifted on to 
the broad shoulders of the state or greedily ab- 
sorbed by the bureaucrats. 

Now and then perhaps a college will be estab- 
lished or maintained by some individual for fun, 
as he would maintain a private yacht, though why 
any one should do so may be a mystery to you. 
You can not eat a college, you can not travel in it, 
you can not clip coupons from it, and no stock ex- 
change lists its stock ; yet an exceptional man here 
and there testifies that there is no other hobby so 
absorbing, none so stimulating, none so likely to 
remain exclusive, the prerogative of kings, multi- 
millionaires and democracies, because like other 
exclusive hobbies no one can afford to ride them if 
he must ask, ''how much," before he mounts, or 
keep an eye on the taximeter as he rides. But for 
the most part our voluntary enterprises in Amer- 
ica are founded and maintained not as luxuries, 
but for an end esteemed worth while by men accus- 
tomed to count the cost and as an imperative 
duty by those accustomed to hearken to the inward 
voice of enlightened conscience. It is these men 
who are asking in all seriousness to-day, "Do the 
voluntary institutions differ in any way from state 
institutions in the contribution they make to 
American life, and would any important element 
be missing from our commonwealth, were all our 
professors placed upon the pay roll of the state?" 

11 



College and Commonwealth 

To this question it is not sufficient to answer, what 
has been will be. 

The American college in the sense in which we 
use the word is less than a century old. Fifty 
years ago the largest American college, Harvard, 
had no more students than Lafayette has to-day. 
Why, therefore, when the American college is so 
new, should we think its history so nearly written? 
Why should we not anticipate as radical changes, 
as great advances, as revolutionary ideas in the 
college of to-morrow as in the college of yester- 
day? The answer to the question is part of the 
larger question, "How much voluntaryism do we 
want to preserve in American life?" ''How far 
are we prepared to go, not in socializing the state, 
but in governmentalizing society?" 

I had heard reports over in New York that in 
Pennsylvania a charitable institution was defined 
as one which got all it could from the state treas- 
ury, instead of one which contributed all it could 
to the state, but I was somewhat taken aback to 
be informed this month, by a representative of 
a public service corporation, that in Pennsylvania 
a college was not classed as a charitable institu- 
tion unless it received money from the state treas- 
ury. I am glad to have learned on further inquiry 
that, though this conception may prevail in the 
public mind, it has not yet been written into the 
law of Pennsylvania, nor this narrow conception 
of the commonwealth made an official creed. Per- 
haps the reason why the voluntary foundations 
have hardly held their own with tax-supported in- 

12 



College and Commonwealth 

stitutions in recent years is that in education, as 
in religion, it is the poor who hear gladly any 
message of advance, of better things within reach, 
and the poor turn naturally in a democracy to 
government, the easiest instrument through which 
the common man can make his faith effective. 
President King has said of knowledge, ^'knowl- 
edge has been increased too fast in recent years to 
have undergone thoroughly the process of ideal- 
ization." So, too, the wealth of modem society 
has come too fast for interest in literature and sci- 
ence to keep pace, and the founding of private for- 
tunes has outstripped the establishment of more 
permanent foundations, until for every college or 
university which exists in the United States to- 
day, numerous as they are, there is an individual 
counting only as one, according to our modern util- 
itarian philosophy, whose personal income for a 
single year, according to the federal income tax re- 
turn, is equal not to the income of the college or 
university with which he may be paired, but to the 
capital which it has painfully gathered through 
the generations. 

Conceding room for the voluntary college in 
our scheme of American education, therefore, how 
shall it justify itself, what will be its distinctive 
contribution to the commonwealth? This is the 
question I ask myself in this inaugural. It is not 
a question to which time will permit me to find a 
full answer. But the books of the voluntary col- 
leges, financial and otherwise, are open to the 
world, and he who will may read by the light of 

J3 



College and Commonwealth 

history. One answer to the question I must give. 
Even in this age of ubiquitous omniscience I think 
it is well to maintain a distinction between school 
and armory, between school and state house, be- 
tween school and country club, between school and 
counting house, between school and church, be- 
tween school and hospital. The college will not 
do everything that has to be done in the world. 
Nor will all the colleges have to do be done by any 
one college. There have been college presidents 
that have been great schoolmasters. If the col- 
lege president of to-day is held down by worldly 
cares from aspiring so high, he may at least count 
himself fortunate if he shares the fellowship of 
great schoolmasters in his faculty. My first an- 
swer, therefore, to the question, ''What will the 
college contribute to the state?" is, ''The college 
will teach. ' ' 

While my inauguration has been postponed to 
this hour, I should have felt that I had come to 
Lafayette too late, had I not come in time to know 
one whom we miss at these exercises, that great 
schoolmaster, Joseph Hardy, in whose classroom 
lingered an atmosphere of an older day, when a 
college was a school, where the professor had 
something important to teach and the scholar had 
something important to learn, and where there 
was no confusion as to which was teacher and 
which pupil. 

Lafayette has been singularly blessed in great 
teachers, including its greatest teacher, the scholar 
of international fame, who fifty years ago at Am- 

H 



College and Commonwealth 

herst defined the true scholar as one "who will 
not spend his life in general devotion to truth 
without cultivating any one truth, celebrating and 
worshiping truth as a goddess, wooing and win- 
ning none of her daughters, ' ' and who exemplified 
his own definition by rising to a foremost place in 
his own specialty. Lafayette, indeed, has been 
out of fashion so long in sticking to the school- 
master idea that she needs but cling to it a little 
longer to find herself leading in the newest move- 
ment in education. 

I think it worth while to repeat the thesis. The 
first service of the college is to teach ; to teach, in 
the first place, a handful of young men. That, you 
think, goes without saying, but does it? By teach- 
ing I do not mean training, drawing forth the in- 
nate power, the development of character, the 
stimulation of ambition, but by teaching I mean 
just what it means in the primary school, impart- 
ing to the student, in such a way that it becomes 
a permanent possession, a knowledge of truth and 
things, a knowledge also of causes and of values. 
I find a good deal of skepticism as to the value 
of this part of the colleges' work. Do we Amer- 
icans generally prize very highly the knowledge 
which the college curriculum purports to impart? 
Do we not rather all agree that the majority of 
college students do not know five years after 
graduation what they gave sufficient evidence of 
knowing to pass the college examinations? Is 
there any society or set or group to whom pre- 
eminence is generally accorded, in which betrayal 

15 



College and Commonwealth 

of ignorance in any sphere causes loss of caste as 
a breach of etiquette does in a social club? On 
the contrary, is it not the mark of membership in 
the most exclusive scientific circles to disclaim the 
possession of knowledge, or even of a natural curi- 
osity in any, except a limited field? Is it not the 
fashion to say, "I remember nothing of what I 
learned at college, but the impress of this or that 
man will never leave me?" But why buy com- 
radeship at so high a price as that paid in the 
arduous path of learning? Why not the country 
club, with good fellowship in hotly contested 
sports and more leisurely golf contests? 

Was Tholuck right when he said, ''My most im- 
portant work is my walks with individual boys, 
not my lectures in the classroom? ' ' Why not then 
dissolve the university again into peripatetic so- 
phists ? What were the schools that made Alcuin 
the great schoolmaster of his day and gave his 
great patron, Charles the Great, immortal fame 
as celebrated in the window here behind me? 
They were for the most part companies of monks 
set to copy manuscripts and so preserve from ex- 
tinction the world ^s knowledge. Thus Alcuin ex- 
horts his pupils to "beware of introducing their 
own frivolities in the words they copy, nor to let a 
trifler's hand make mistakes through haste." 
Writing books (and he means by that merely copy- 
ing books) is better, he exhorted, than planting 
vines, "for he who plants a vine serves his belly, 
but he who writes a book serves his soul." The 
mere transmission of the world ^s knowledge is of 

i6 



College and Commonwealth 

more significance than we realize in this day of 
the printing press. So strongly do I believe that 
it is the function of the college to teach that, if 
the knowledge imparted is not worth remember- 
ing, I would replace it in the curriculum with some- 
thing that is so worth while. If the method of 
teaching gives us a student who does not know as 
a senior what he knew as a freshman, nor as alum- 
nus what he knew at commencement, , I would 
change the method of teaching. If our method of 
teaching language does not give the student facil- 
ity in either reading or speaking a language, we 
must improve the method. If the knowledge im- 
parted is so strongly tinged with the personality 
of the teacher and so little a part of what should 
be expected of the educated citizen of the world 
that it can not be tested in a comprehensive exam- 
ination by some one other than the instructor, then 
is the knowledge, indeed, of little worth. 

There is no commonwealth in America to-day 
which does not need exact knowledge, and this is 
true of all ranks of society. It is true of the 
mechanic no less than of the man who makes our 
laws in the legislature. It is above all true of the 
leaders of public thought and opinion, whether we 
want to make a new tariff or devise a new currency 
law. With the increasing complexity of our civili- 
zation it is almost impossible for the common- 
wealth to find men who can really see the common- 
wealth as a whole or whose minds are sufficiently 
disciplined not to have their vision distorted by 
personal preference or passion, 

17 



College and Commonwealth 

The first duty of the college is to teach, because 
that is its peculiar duty, because it is a school and 
systematic teaching its chief object. It need not, 
however, teach everything to equal extent. We 
need more specialization in our teaching. The 
state has felt that it could specialize in agriculture 
just as it has felt it could give away free seeds, 
because agriculture has been considered the basic 
life of the state, but when it comes to further 
specialization the state is embarrassed. Equality 
of treatment is the national watchword. If we 
teach German in our schools we must teach Italian, 
the politician discovers; if Italian, Spanish. If 
the arts course is free, the engineering course 
must be free; if engineering is free, then too, 
law and medicine. In at least one western state 
university it has been found necessary for political 
reasons to avoid invidious distinctions, in assign- 
ing credits for entrance subjects, so that every- 
thing, whether it be Greek or blacksmithing, must 
be assigned academic values on the basis of time 
alone. The state must have a university where, 
as Ezra Cornell wished, any one may find instruc- 
tion in anything. Slow, gradual raising of the 
average must be the task of the state. 

The voluntary college may make a different con- 
tribution. She may, if she will, be one-sided. 
She may, if she will, ignore whole fields of knowl- 
edge. She may, if she will, pick and choose her 
students. She may, if she will, even pick and 
choose her teachers. She may have what we call 
character, personality, a decided set in one direc- 

18 



College and Commonwealth 

tion. She may, if she will, be little, not big, and 
it is true, as Van Dyke says, ''We admire the 
ocean, we love the little rivers." She may seek 
to train leaders, prophets, seers. She may even 
be religious, Presbyterian if you please, and make 
religious exercises a part of her compulsory cur- 
riculum. Calvinistic though we Presbyterians be, 
no race has perhaps set greater store by its free- 
dom of choice, and its theology has been careful to 
safeguard ' ' the liberty of the creature. ' ' All that 
our fathers dreamed of the fruits of freedom for 
the creature, we may dream as the fruits of free- 
dom in educational enterprise. All that the state 
has gained from according freedom to its indi- 
vidual citizens it will gain by according freedom 
to its voluntary institutions. 

I accept, therefore, Mr. President, the high of- 
fice to which you have called me, not regretful that 
this college is a voluntary one ; that it must beg the 
bread it eats and cannot dip mth others in the 
common bowl, hard as such a condition is for its 
executive, because we believe that thereby we 
shall win to a larger freedom both for ourselves, 
for our commonwealth and for truth, stern master 
of us all. The mission of the independent college 
is not yet done in this commonwealth of ours. 
Large tasks await the college, still discernible in 
spite of the shadows cast by war upon our aca- 
demic groves, and for these we gird ourselves, 
feign to make that splendid inaugural address of 
Akbar our own : — 



19 



College and Commonwealth 

"I have set my heart 
On making beauty, truth and justice shine 
As the ordered stars above the darkened earth. 
Are not these also things to be desired, 
And striven for with no uncertain toil f 
And save through them, whence comes the gift of peace? 

' ' Here will I build my capital, and here 
The world shall come unto a council hall, 
And in a place of peace pursue the quest 
Of wisdom and the finding out of truth. 

"That there be no more discord upon earth, 
But only knowledge, beauty, and good will." 

(Bliss Carman, "The Gate of Peace") 



30 



THE COLLEGE AND THE INDIVIDUAL 

THE concern of the college is the individual. 
In our various laboratories we count by dif- 
ferent units, ^ons in geology, footpounds in 
physics, electrons in chemistry, cells in biology. 
The unit of college computation is the man. 
"When we forget this, we lose our way in the edu- 
cational world. 

This does not mean, however, that the college 
which can count the most graduates is the greatest 
college. Because to-day for $1.25 you can buy 
downtown a basket of potatoes the size of marbles 
— the kind that in ordinary years would be left 
to rot in the field — and so get 200 or 300 potatoes 
in the same measure which once held fifty, it does 
not follow that it is a great potato year. 

Neither does it follow that the greatness or 
smallness, the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of 
any particular member of the graduating class 
measures the institution. Tell a man that he is 
the unit by which you measure, and he is very 
likely to imagine himself the size of the thing to be 
measured. He is not content, like a footrule used 
to measure Pardee Hall, to remain a footrule. He 
is more likely to act the part of the dressmaker's 
collapsible form and try to swell to the size of the 
thing measured. 

Address at the Eighty-fifth Commencement of Lafayette Col- 
lege, June 7, 1920. 

21 



The College and the Individual 

There is good ground, theological and philo- 
sophical, for the old slogan ''Man the measure of 
all things," but popularly interpreted, we find it 
gives us some romantic egoist such as Mr. Fitz- 
gerald has pictured in his recent novel, who after 
some years of prep school and graduation from 
Princeton, and a wide social experience, feels that 
he has achieved the summit of wisdom when he 
can say, ''I know myself but that is all." Thus 
Amory Blaine agrees with Alexander Pope in his 
final conclusion of the whole matter, "All our 
knowledge is ourselves to know," if not with 
Pope 's twin axiom ' ' That, virtue only, makes our 
bliss below." It is a form of wisdom ascribed in 
"Pilgrim's Progress" to the young man Igno- 
rance, who enters on the way by "the little 
crooked lane" from the "country of Conceit." 

His final argument was, you will recall, in each 
case "My heart tells me so. " To which Christian 
rather brutally rejoined, "The wise man says 'He 
that trusteth in his own heart is a fool. * ' ' Never- 
theless you will recall that Ignorance, trusting in 
his heart, attained the very gate of the Celestial 
City, and that with somewhat less trouble than 
Christian, but his ultimate destination caused 
Christian to observe, ' ' Then I saw that there was 
a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven, as 
well as from the city of Destruction." An obser- 
vation which he has doubtless had occasion to con- 
firm by recent events in American politics. 

Man is the measure of the college. At once in 
a democracy there is a cry, then let us test the 

22 



The College and the Individual 

college by a vote. All who think it a good college 
say Aye, opposed No. The ayes have it, and the 
truth is discovered. 

But my fundamiental theorem does not mean this 
either. The majority do not rule in the halls of 
truth. One may vote with Galileo and ninety-nine 
against him, but the earth moves just the same. 
Indeed one of the chief objects of the college is 
to create a man with sufficient knowledge and in- 
sight to be content to stand for the most part with 
minorities against popular errors and supersti- 
tions. Neither does my thesis mean that a satis- 
fied customer is the best recommendation of the 
institution's worth. Colleges are not here to cre- 
ate satisfaction, but hunger and thirst after 
knowledge, and if their customers are satisfied, 
are filled and not hungry, you may be sure that the 
college has failed to achieve its mission. 

What then do we mean by saying that Man is 
the unit by which we count the achievements of a 
college ? It is a declaration of faith : 

First — That colleges are made for man, not man 
for the colleges. 

Second — That so far as the vision of the college 
can see, there is no end of greater value, or better 
worth seeking, than the perfect man. 

Third — That the particularistic philosophy of 
life is better than the communistic, for the reason 
that abstract ideals have ultimate value only as we 
can look for their incarnation in some particular 
individual, or individuals ; and 

Fourth — As William James would put it, that 

23 



The College and the Individual 

God thinks concrete particulars, rather than ab- 
stract generalities, and that if our thinking powers 
were as great as His, we could discard abstract 
ideas, and individuals and concrete occasions 
would alone remain real. 

I venture to go back to these fundamental truths 
of our college thinking this morning, because I 
want to build upon them some observations which 
you will all recognize as contrary to the prevailing 
trend of thought, but which are, I believe, never- 
theless sound from our college point of view. 

"War placed a great premium upon mass. True 
this last war gave more attention to the individual 
than any war has ever done before. It went to 
infinite pains to identify the individual soldier, 
dead or alive, to shield him from contagion, to 
cheer him with amusement, to nurse him when ill, 
to restore him to useful occupation when maimed 
— and nevertheless the thought of the war was in 
terms of divisions, of hundreds of thousands and 
millions, rather than in terms of individuals. 
Machine guns, such as the one Mr. McCabe there 
operated, which can fire six shells a minute, make 
short work of the hundreds and the thousands. 
Shells or soldiers, it was a war not of thousands 
but of tens of thousands and millions. "We heard 
on every side talk of mobilizing not an army but 
the nation. What any one did, every one must do. 
The draft must cover all men of serviceable age. 
Every one must buy a liberty bond. The nation 
must stand and move as one man. The result was 
mass thinking. The individual was discarded as 

24 



The College and the Individual 

a unit of reckoning. Democracy, freedom, patri- 
otism, great abstract ideals, were enthusiastically 
toasted with as little thought given to interpreta- 
tion in terms of the individual, as Mr. Midshipman 
Easy had given, according to Marryat, to the ap- 
plication of the splendid ideal of equality, before 
his arrival on shipboard. 

Abstract ideals, like lightning, are wonderful 
things to attract the attention and stir the pulse, 
they are real as lightning is real, and in the hands 
of a Benjamin Franklin, may be turned to useful 
purpose, but in the hands of the inexperienced are 
as dangerous as Jove's thunderbolts. 

And now that the crisis is past, these splendid 
ideals have become the playthings of the ignorant, 
and like unexploded shells on a battlefield after the 
war is over, may injure the very men they were 
created to help. 

Men are arguing, the war was fought that all 
men should be free. That means that I must be 
free of all restraint, and need recognize only such 
obligations as I choose. The war was fought that 
smaller groups might choose their own rulers. 
That means that if we socialists, or we trade 
unionists, or we college men, or we capitalists, 
don't like the government, we are free to discard 
it for one of our own. Once break up the status 
quo, once admit that nations can be carved as 
chickens, irrespective of the organic unity that 
held them together while the old regime breathed, 
and it is difficult to set any theoretic bounds to 
your subdivisions, short of the individual. 

25 



The College and the Individual 

''Shall the individual not be free to strike, if 
he will!" cries Mr. Gompers. ''Shall the indi- 
vidual not be free not to strike in spite of Mr. 
Gompers' orders'?" asks Governor Allen. Duty 
is not collective ; it is personal, declares Governor 
Coolidge, but at the same time he declares the 
safety of society the supreme law. Freedom and 
responsibility, instead of being correlative as we 
have been taught to expect appear divergent. 
Philip Gibbs in a recent article writes, ' ' The chief 
charge leveled against the intellectual tendency 
of the United States may be summed up in one 
word — Intolerance. Foreign students do not find 
in their study of the American temperament or in 
the American form of government, the sense of lib- 
erty with which the people of the United States 
credit themselves. ' ^ 

It was in another time of war that Lincoln said : 
"The world has never had a good definition of 
the word liberty, and the American people, just 
now, are much in want of one. We all declare for 
liberty, but in using the same word, we do not 
mean the same thing. We assume the word 
liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases 
with himself and the product of his labor, while 
with others the same word may mean for some men 
to do as they please with other men, and the pro- 
duct of other men's labors." 

Where the rights of the individual leave off and 
the rights of society begin, is the burning question 
of the hour in church and state, the world around. 
I think it worth while, therefore, to go back to 

26 



The College and the Individual 

fundamentals, and as college men at least to start 
our argument afresh. It is quite possible that we 
shall find that if the college exists for man, and 
not man for the college, the same may be true in 
the larger world outside, for as Aristotle observed 
long since, ' ' He who would duly enquire about the 
best form of a state ought first to determine which 
is the most eligible life; for while this remains 
uncertain, the best form of the state must also be 
uncertain. Then we ought to ascertain whether 
the same life is or is not best for the state and for 
individuals." 

The eligible life, what is our dream or vision 
of it to-day? We exalt a brotherhood of scholars 
like this as a form of the eligible life. We believe 
in the college as an organism with a corporate 
consciousness. A college professor, writing in 
the June "Harper's," says, "Life in a college is 
halfway between earth and Heaven," but would 
we exclaim with Emerson, "Oh! what is Heaven, 
but the fellowship of minds, that each can stand 
against the world by its own meek and incorrupt- 
ible will. ' ' 

Do we cry with Patrick Henry, "As for me, 
give me liberty or give me death !" — or do we say, 
"Everybody's doing it, so also must I?" Is it 
our great ambition "to belong" or to be free? 
To belong to a club, to a tradesunion, to a political 
party to a fraternal organization? Are we so so- 
cially minded that we are prepared to say with 
Cluton Brock, "Unless all can be saved, none can 
be saved"? Or is our manner of thought more 

27 



The College and the Individual 

individualistic, more like that of Christ, who, when 
asked. Lord, are there few that be saved? an- 
swered, Think not in terms of the group, strive 
yourself to enter in at the narrow gate. 

What is our conception of the relation of prop- 
erty to the eligible life? Have we imbibed the 
free and easy communistic spirit of college halls, 
which holds all things common and is always will- 
ing that the last man out shall settle the check, or 
shoulder the deficit? Or have we learned in a 
more bitter school of experience that everything 
worthwhile costs somebody sweat and blood, so 
that we measure property by the effort and fatigue 
it cost, and feel that property should be as per- 
sonal and individual a thing as fatigue is? That 
it makes quite a difference whether the back-ache 
is in my back or in yours. 

The trend in college circles the last fifty years 
has all been toward an emphasis on social relation- 
ships. We have emphasized the social sciences. 
We have taught our men to think of their duty to ^ 
their neighbor, to think of themselves as members 
of a complicated social structure. We have in- 
vented a science of sociology. We have stressed 
government and laws of trade and of intercourse. 
We have talked a great deal about team work, and 
have magnified democracy — government of the 
people, by the people — ^until we do not believe one 
man can even draw up a resolution of condolence, 
but must commit it to a committee of at least three. 
We live in a world of machinery. No piece of 
machinery lives to itself. It is connected by belts 

28 



The College and the Individual 

and shafts, by wires and bolts to a system. The 
old-fashioned stove in the class room has given 
place to a central heating plant, and the open fire- 
place in the house, where we could accurately 
measure the ratio between personal effort and 
heat, has given place to an unseen furnace, with a 
complicated system of pipes, which can only burn 
one kind of fuel, which is mined by men we never 
see and must be bought from a monopoly at a price 
to be fixed after purchase at the pleasure of the 
mine owner, mine worker and the government. 

It is not strange that we lose the notion of our- 
selves as free and independent individuals, and 
begin to think of ourselves as cogs in a machine. 
Beginning as a nation that believed that a man 
had certain inalienable rights, our Anglo-Saxon- 
ism has been so diluted mth Semitic, and Slavic, 
Teutonic and Celtic strains, that we are not sure 
now, that man has any inalienable right of any 
kind which an authority-drunken majority is 
morally bound to respect. Even in our own Pres- 
byterian General Assembly, the majority may pass 
a resolution about anything under the sun, and it 
strikes few as incongruous. What the majority 
want is right — what the majority vote is the truth. 
America, once the home of constitutional liberty, 
is to-day more intolerant than England or Canada, 
and views with suspicion any man who does not 
run with the pack, or make his demands with a 
mob at his back. 

I want to-day to make a plea for a place for 
individualism in America. "We freely acknowl- 

29 



The College and the Individual 

edge we are not producing our share of the 
world's most constructive leaders. Not alone in 
poetry and art, but even in foreign trade we lack 
courage and invention. The fate of the Cuban 
sugar crop is witness to that. Our boasted inven- 
tiveness in mechanics made a sorry showing in 
the business of aeroplanes in the war. Our fore- 
most naval officer was Canadian born. Our most 
successful war administrator acquired his philoso- 
phy of life in London and Australia. The most 
constructive critic of our government machinery, 
a cabinet member in the present administration — 
was a Canadian by birth. The chief Presbyterian 
pulpits of New York and Philadelphia are occu- 
pied by native Scotchmen. Our greatest techno- 
logical school was administered until recently by 
a man whose ideals were formed in New Zealand, 
and we have committed the leadership of more 
than one of our greatest state universities to the 
hands of men not American bom. 

It is high time that we stop and ask ourselves, 
Where is the weak spot in our national philosophy 
of life? It is not too much religion, because the 
Scot has that as well as we. It is not too much 
of life family style, because French and Italians 
and Germans carry that to greater extremes than 
do we. It may be enervating luxury, because we 
are the nation of most widely disseminated wealth, 
though not of greatest contrasts of life, known to 
history. It may be our national idea of sport, 
which is to sit cheering in the bleachers while 
some one else works. It may be the deadening in- 

30 



The College and the Individual 

fluence of an outgrown, school system, adapted to 
the needs of the dull pupil. It may be a certain 
feminism, due to the exalted position accorded 
women, the highest known to civilization. It may 
be the inevitable leveling process of pure democ- 
racy and the increasing disposition to count, not 
weigh, opinions, so that even as intelligent a man 
as Vice President Marshall joins in the popular 
cry of the futility of representative government, 
saying as he did at the recent Assembly, "Con- 
gress, Congress could not settle a cup of coffee" — 
you, the people, knowing the real truth of things 
and the way out so much better than your picked 
representatives in House or Senate or Executive 
Mansion, you must settle these momentous issues 
for the nation. 

While Democracy tends to destroy individuals, 
Democracy on the other hand, if it thinks at all, 
if it expresses itself at all, must do so through 
individuals. It thinks not in abstract principles, 
it thinks in terms of individuals. The League of 
Nations is Wilson, and Wilson is the League of 
Nations. Reservations are Lodge and Lodge is 
reservations. America isolate is Hiram Johnson. 
Trade Unionism is Gompers, and so it goes. Dem- 
ocracy will prevent your being an individual if it 
can, but if you become one in spite of it, it will 
make you a demigod. In an inarticulate way, the 
country knows to-day the kind of man it wants for 
President. If it could once see him, it would know 
him. It could draw the specifications — a man 
who believes in a league of nations, which will be 

31 



The College and the Individual 

a real league and not a ' ' big four ' ' affair or glori- 
fied expansion of the British Empire — and which 
gives reasonable promise of promoting the peace 
of the world. A man who is not unsympathetic 
with the rights and aspirations of labor, but who 
is not afraid of the trade-unions, who will point 
out the falseness of many trade-union ideals, the 
damage they have done to American standards of 
honest craftsmanship. A man who as an em- 
X)loyer of labor has made some substantial contri- 
bution toward a better working basis for capital 
and labor. A man who has been trained in the 
ten commandments and has so disciplined himself 
that he is immune from the temptation of coveting 
the possessions of his more prosperous neighbor, 
and who is not, therefore, sympathetic to schemes 
of taxation wliich have their root in the passion 
of covetousness, and are but thinly-veiled forms of 
brigandage. A man who knows by his own ex- 
perience that the life of man is a life of toil by 
the very rules of the game, who knows that wage- 
fixing will not release men from toil in the long 
run, no matter how skillfully juggled, and that the 
only thing that will permanently release man from 
toil is science and scientific invention and morality 
of life. A man whose back is bent as was Lin- 
coln's by sympathy with the toil and strain and 
suffering of all classes of men and women, and who 
will not willingly add a jot to the burden, nor add 
himself to the lawyers and red-tapists and men of 
brains but no conscience, who bind burdens 

32 



The College and the Individual 

grievous to be borne while they themselves touch 
not one with their little finger. 

A man, therefore, who will go the most direct 
road, live the simplest life, content himself with a 
plain yea and nay, doing the right as God gives 
him to see the right, rather than seeking to give 
the pubhc what it wants for the sake of personal 
popularity or advantage. A man with a passion 
for justice — and a man who knows that the usual 
fate awaiting ''FaithfuP' is torture and death in 
''Vanity Fair." It is because America has not 
been able, in this critical juncture, to discern these 
qualities combined in any one man that the nomi- 
nation. Republican or Deniocratic, is still said to 
be any one's fight. 

The public to-day is more nearly unanimous in 
what it wants done than the politicians think. On 
the other hand, public leaders competent to in- 
terpret these desires and to achieve these ends, 
were never more scarce than they are to-day. 

A great deal of the blame for this shortage of 
the right kind of leaders lies, in my opinion, at 
the door of the American college. Every college 
is to-day, of course, to a greater degree than ever^ 
in the history of the world, the child of its tim( 
There are no cloisters. The news of the metropy 
lis reaches the campus even before the metropo^- 
tan reader is awake. The books, the plays, A® 
periodicals, are the same for student and for /red 
business man. Student activities, college cus/oms, 
take so much time — there is so much confftmity 

33 



The College and the Individual 

to be observed that original thought is crowded 
out and discouraged. 

If a man has signs of genius or distinguishing 
markings, if he is a variant of nature from the 
accepted type, that may be the beginning of a new 
era or a new species, then every effort is made to 
tame him, and dress him down to the regulation 
pattern, to make of him what Fitzgerald would 
call a ''slicker.'^ 

Side by side with this leveling instinct of 
democracy goes the demand for the superman. 
Unwarned by the fate of Germany, where a com- 
munistic philosophy created as its natural counter- 
part the cult of the superman, we lend an ear to 
the advice of Alphonso of Castile: 

"Earth crowded cries, Too many men! 
My counsel is, kill nine of ten — 
And bestow the shares of all 
On the remnant decimal. 
Add their nine lives to this cat. 
Stuff their nine brains in one hat; 
Make his frame and forces square 
"With the labors he must dare, 
Thatch his flesh, and even his years. 
With the marble which he rears, 
There growing slowly old at ease 
No faster than his planted trees ; 
He may by warrant of his age 
In schemes of broader scope engage, 
So shall ye have a man of the sphere 
Fit to grace the solar year. ' ' 

But '>ii the whole we do not take kindly to the 
34 



The College and the Individual 



pinched bud theory of creating the individual 
leaders which the state requires. And just at 
present, as the result of the war, there is a decided 
reaction against supermen in general. We are a 
little skeptical about infallible leaders, and feel 
we would rather trust our destinies to a team of 
several individuals of good average strength than 
to a team with a star so big that only satellites 
can approach. 

Demolins, in the book which made such a stir 
twenty years ago, raised the question. To what is 
Anglo-Saxon superiority due? and found the an- 
swer to his question in the individualism of the 
Anglo-Saxon. In the fact that instead of the com- 
munity predominating over the individual, the 
individual has been made to prevail over the com- 
munity, private life over public life, the useful 
professions over liberal and administrative pro- 
fessions. To the Saxon farmer, the eligible life is 
the rural estate, on which the individual is per- 
fectly independent of his neighbors and of the 
political chiefs. 

Alfred the Great, himself, cannot enroll in his 
army any but the Saxons who are willing, and/ 
who have an interest to serve, or who conside/ 
that the cause of war is worth fighting for. A/ 
are land-owners. All equal in rights. The Sax^ 
institution of trial by jury begins spontaneoi/^y 
between neighboring land owners. Against/tli® 
Dane, the Saxon claimed self-govern/ient. 
Against the Norman, the Saxon claime/ fi"^® 
fundamental rights: (1) That of bequ/a thing 

35 



The College and the Individual 

their property to their descendants without con- 
trol. (2) To be taxed within the limit of their 
ability to pay. (3) To receive payment for any 
compulsory work they were made to do. (4) To 
be left to transact business among'st themselves 
according to their old Saxon customs. (5) That 
they should be left the exercise of justice even 
towards any of their fellows against whom a Nor- 
man preferred any complaint. 

To secure these rights they made an alliance 
with the Norman nobility against the autocracy 
of a Norman king, and the result was Magna 
Charta. 

Soon there was but one language — the Saxon 
language, and one law, the Saxon common law. 

To-day Anglo-Saxon individualism is threatened 
both in England and America by a communistic 
philosophy of the eligible life made in Germany. 
Socialism is essentially, as Demolins pointed out 
long before the war, a product of German origin 
and manufacture. ''Its center of formation is in 
Germany; it is from Germany that it permeates 
the world." 

Self-reliance is the Anglo-Saxon idea of the 
eligible life. Reliance on the state is the social- 
istic ideal of the eligible life. It is a dream of a 
"society in which the state should regulate and 
organize more or less labor, property, make happy 
one and all by playing the role of a great universal 
employer." Under this ideal of the eligible life, 
we shall all develop more or less the traits and 
ambitions, or lack of ambitions, which now char- 

36 



The College and the Individual 

acterize the great army of government clerks in 
Washington. ' Or according to the hopeful view of 
Fitzgerald, we shall be children enough to work 
our heads off for a strip of blue ribbon. 

''The more a man obeys an inclination to rely 
on help from others," says Demolins, "from the 
community or the state, the less is his force of 
initiative developed, the less is he inclined to exert 
himself personally to make a livelihood. The 
community may be a convenient pillow for those 
societies which are content to slumber; it never 
yet helped the rise of any." 

These two philosophies of life are now in con- 
flict with America as the rich prize for the victor. 
The communistic philosophy has been making the 
greater gains of recent years. This is partly due 
to the fact that while as good Anglo-Saxons we 
kept religion out of the hands of the state, we 
have surrendered its twin sister, education, more 
and more into the hands of government. In Penn- 
sylvania to-day, the particularists, the individual- 
ists, are almost ready to lay down the burden of 
higher education as too heavy for their shoulders, 
and ask the state to assume it. It will mean a 
great stride forward in Pennsylvania for educa- 
tion, but also for the communistic philosophy. It 
will place a heavier burden and responsibility on 
the isolated garrisons in such outposts as Lafay- 
ette to take up the battle of the Saxon, and stand 
more stubbornly than ever, for the rights and re- 
sponsibilities of the individual. We must preach 
anew from Cromwell's text, ''What liberty and 

37 



The College and the Individual 

prosperity depend upon, are the souls of men, and 
the spirits which are the men." It makes it im- 
portant that we emphasize anew man as the unit 
of college reckoning. In mathematics you can get 
units by adding together fractions, but you can't 
do it in politics. Colorless ciphers headed by a 
unit may count a million, but without a unit either 
before or behind them, they are nothing. It is 
better that the unit be before than behind. Lead- 
ers are more needed in a democracy than backers, 
as some presidential candidates are learning. 
Even if the Saxon fight for individualism goes 
against us in the world outside, and we are over- 
whelmed by the onrushing tide of communism, 
we, here at Lafayette, recognizing that nowhere 
are great leaders more needed than in a pure 
democracy, nowhere do they have greater power 
while it lasts, may still pursue undisturbed, our 
task of creating individuals, of making leaders, 
of computing the worth of the college by the men 
it can produce. 

We can still teach here the doctrine. Be a per- 
son and respect others as persons. Then we shall 
have respect for organizations and institutions. 
It is the man who rates society as everything 
and the individual as nothing, who is ready to 
adulate the one individual, who personifies society, 
be he king or president, to endow him with super- 
human attributes, to raise him to absolute do- 
minion, and to roll all the responsibilities of 
government upon his shoulders. 

It is the man who has learned to respect him- 

38 



The College and the Individual 

self and all other men as individuals, who is not 
willing to yield his own rights, and who is ready, 
therefore, to concede rights to others — who has 
faith in republican institutions made for men no 
more infallible than himself, liable to err but on 
the whole honest and men of good will. 

Lafayette College is peculiarly fitted to 
champion individualism. She bears the name of 
a great individualist whose faith in freedom was 
fanned to flame by the idle mirth of a German 
princeling over the ludicrous arrogance of a few 
poor colonists in rebelling against a mighty 
society. 

In no subject has her scholarship attained a 
more assured position than in the study of Anglo- 
Saxon words and roots. It would not be strange 
if in the place where the language was most as- 
siduously studied, stray seeds of 'Saxon spirit 
should find rebirth and rooted deep in knowledge 
and in reverence, grow a mighty tree for the heal- 
ing of the nations. 

When in combination with her French in- 
dividualistic inspiration, her deep-going Saxon 
roots, you find the Presbyterian Scot on the walls, 
you may be sure of a fair field, a broad tolerance 
and freedom of disputation. 

For say what you may of the restricting bonds 
of church relationship, a wide experience will show 
that her tolerance will stand comparison with the 
tolerance of private individuals or of government 
officials, or of fickle mobs. Like Carlyle, we can 
say. If I must trust the holding of the tourney 

39 



The College and the Individual 

to some group, ''I take up with my old love for 
the saints. No class of persons can be found in 
this country with so much humanity in them, nay 
with as much tolerance as the better sort of them 
have. The tolerance of others is but doubt and 
indifference. Touch the thing they do believe and 
value — their own self-conceit — they are rattle- 
snakes then. '^ 

With my associates of the faculty, and with, I 
trust, the cordial support and cooperation of trus- 
tees and alumni, we shall strive in the years to 
come, to make it our motto at Lafayette ''not to 
indoctrinate but to individuate. ' ' 

I count it a privilege that unexpected circum- 
stances devolved on me to-day the task of address- 
ing this graduating class. With the. help of the 
war, the class contains men of more strength and 
individuality than the ordinary routine can per- 
haps produce. It is a pleasure to use such meas- 
uring rods in telling the cubits of this celestial 
city of ours. 

As you plan for an eligible life, and as you look 
out on our seething political world, remember 
Shelley's words: 

"What are numbers knit 
By force or custom? Man who man would be 
Must rule the empire of himself, In it 
Must be supreme, establishing his throne 
On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy 
Of hopes and fears, being himself alone." 

Eemember that no coach can make a strong team 

40 



The College and the Individual j 

out of weak men, though he can make a better ! 

team than they can make of themselves. That no i 

state can long remain great which fetters the i 

growth of great individuals. That \ 

"Navies nor armies can exalt the state ? 

MilHons of men, nor coined wealth untold ;; 

Down to the pit may sink a land of gold. ] 

But one great name can make a country great. ' ' ; 

And go forth to conquer and to serve — go forth s 

to your task of individuation : | 

■( 

"Go forth upon the earth ^ ~ j 

And make there Paradise ,' 

And be the angels of that place '■. 

To make men glad and wise, \ 

With loving kindness in their hearts 

And knowledge in their eyes. i 

And ye shall be man's counselors \ 

That neither rest nor sleep, ] 

To cheer the lonely, lift the frail, ^ 

And solace them that weep. \ 

And ever on his wandering trail .1 

Your watch-fires ye shall keep ; i 

Till in the far years, man shall find \ 

The country of his quest, j 

The empire of the open truth, | 

The vision of the best, I 

Foreseen by every mother dear \ 

"With her new-born on her breast." 

{Bliss Carman, "The Angels of Man") i 



41 



THE COLLEGE OF GROWTH 

IT is with very great pleasure that I meet again, 
even in this formal way, the upper classmen. 
I trust we shall come to know each other better 
than was possible last year because of the ac- 
quaintances I then had to make outside the col- 
lege. I feel that I know you collectively very 
much better than I did a year ago, but I cannot 
but regret that nowadays the work of a college 
president is so much that of a minister of foreign 
affairs. I begin this year feeling fairly well ac- 
quainted with the faculty and buildings and alumni 
of Lafayette. I hope, before the year is over, to 
feel fairly well acquainted with individual stu- 
dents. If, however, freshmen continue to come in 
such numbers, you will realize that even though I 
should make the acquaintance of a new man each 
day of the college year, and should forget no one 
whom I had met, it would require the whole col- 
lege year to meet the freshman class individually. 
I trust, therefore, that you will share the task 
with me, and if I cannot know every student, that 
every student will know me and feel that the presi- 
dent is at least a potential friend and very ready 
to help. 

You have, perhaps, seen a series of cartoons 

Address at the opening of Lafayette College, September, 1916. 

42 



The College of Growth 

running in some of the papers, under the caption 
''When a feller needs a friend." I think perhaps 
the most amusing series of all might be drawn by 
college men, or at any rate by a college president. 
I trust, however, that you will feel ''when a feller 
needs a friend," that the president is accessible 
to any of you. 

Lafayette College bears the name of a man who 
made his great decision and undertook his adven- 
turous voyage to America, when no older than the 
average American boy when he enters college. 
True to its name, Lafayette is a young man's 
college. Masculine in name and tradition, it ad- 
mits only men. Its student body numbers six 
hundred and it is the purpose of the trustees by 
strict enforcement of entrance requirements, and 
by the maintenance of a relatively high scale of 
college fees, to prevent the number rising much 
beyond this limit. 

True to its name again, the contribution which 
Lafayette proposes to make to America is one of 
quality, not of quantity. The Marquis Lafayette 
was worth more to the American cause than a 
whole regiment would have been. The adminis- 
tration hopes in a few years to be in a position 
to select its student body with the same care with 
which it now selects its faculty. It is more of a 
privilege to attend Lafayette now than you recog- 
nize. It mil be a privilege more difficult of at- 
tainment in the future than in the past. The 
young man of to-day can assume the name of a 
Lafayette man, with the moral certainty that the 

43 



The College of Growth 

name will grow in worth and fame in the years 
to come. With one of the largest student bodies 
gathered in any independent American college for 
men, the ambition of I^afayette is not to become 
a University but to maintain the ideals of the 
small college. Whenever it is a question between 
quantity and quality, between size and thorough- 
ness, we propose to sacrifice quantity for quality. 

Such an ideal is contrary to the more dominant 
ideals of American life up to this time. As Lord 
Bryce has justly observed: ''Foreign critics 
often say and some domestic critics have echoed 
the censure, that what is chiefly admired in 
America is bigness, things being measured by their 
size or by what they cost. This quantitative esti- 
mate finds little place in the colleges and univer- 
sities. With very few exceptions, the teaching 
staff are not thinking of size, nor of money, ex- 
cept so far as it helps to extend the usefulness of 
their institution. All the better men, and not 
merely the ablest men, but the good average men, 
feel that it is the mission of a college or university 
to seek and find and set forth the real values." 

It is hard, however, in a great democracy like 
ours to preserve faith in quality, unless the quality 
be expressed also in quantity. It is the automo- 
bile manufacturer who can make a half million 
good cars who reaps the big profits. It is the 
novelist whose book sells by the half million who 
is acclaimed the great author. It is the five cent 
weekly, it is the five and ten-cent theater, it is the 
five and ten-cent store, which reflect the demands 

44 



The College of Growth 

of our democratic age. To be truly democratic, to 
attain success in a democracy, means to be uni- 
versal, it would seem. Is it wise then even in edu- 
cation to deliberately set a standard of quality 
superior to the popular demand? 

Again, is it wise in a growing country to de- 
liberately propose to check growth? To the great 
war convulsing the world to-day we look for light 
on the question whether a nation to be healthy, 
must increase in area, in population, in wealth, 
whether aggrandizement is the law of this world, 
and whether the choice lies merely between ag- 
grandizing or being aggrandized. We are in- 
clined to think that the real is the moving, not 
that which is standing still ; and that it is a world 
which has forgotten its physics, and the true mean- 
ing of the law of inertia, that thinks it is more 
natural to stand still, than to move. To the scien- 
tist of to-day, the universe is a universe of forces, 
not of things ; and the biologist, and chemist, and 
even the physicist threaten to crowd the geologist 
from his relative repose. What then of this per- 
petual motion, of this striving and energizing, 
must we go forward lest we go back, must we get 
lest we be gotten, must we kill or be killed, rule 
or obey? 

What of the possibility of substituting internal 
improvement for external growth, what of substi- 
tuting quality for quantity, what of seeking per- 
fection instead of seeking to be great ? Is perfec- 
tion like the perfection of the flower, but the pre- 
lude to decay! Consider the lilies of the field, 

45 



The College of Growth 

when they are most perfect their decay is the near- 
est. 

These are questions which the world is asking 
to-day, and asking more seriously than ever be- 
fore. There was a time when knowledge was pro- 
vincial. If the facts of our nation did not square 
with our theories, we could always hope that that 
was a local phenomenon and did not reflect the 
truth of the world. If the facts of our day did 
not square with our theories, we could hope that 
was a temporary disturbance or aberration in the 
current of events. But as knowledge grows and 
means of communication improve, and printing 
makes universally available the experience of men 
through the ages, we are more hard pressed, in our 
efforts to maintain a philosophy which does not 
account for all the facts of life that w^e know. 

We cannot hope to settle the broader question 
this morning for nations or even institutions, but 
perhaps we may make a suggestion or two regard- 
ing the individual. "Very early, ^^ says Margaret 
Fuller, "I perceived that the object of life was to 
grow. ^' It is easier to perceive that early than 
it is late, if by growth we mean growth of stature. 
Probably a good many of the freshmen are here 
to-day with the words of parents and friends ring- 
ing in their ears. You are now a full grown man, 
or I hope you will grow into a well developed man 
as the result of your course at college. One way 
or the other you are thinking of growth, either 
that you are grown up, or that you hope to grow 
into full manhood. And vou know enough popular 

46 



The College of Growth 

biology to know that growth is dependent on get- 
ting your share and assimilating it, or turning it 
to your own uses. But if you go on further you 
know that growth is not a question of increasing 
size, but of increasing the complexity of organiza- 
tion, of forming more associations, of discovering 
likenesses and dissimilarity, of ordering and 
classifying and labeling. Still you must get, stiU 
you must assimilate, but the amount of cruder 
stuff, food and physical comforts which you can 
use to advantage is strictly limited. A nice bal- 
ance must be maintained or your more delicate 
machinery will not work. If your appetites are 
the same as those when you were growing in 
stature, there will be no mental growth. Then, as 
Dante says in the Divine Comedy, 

* ' Blessed are they, whom grace 

Doth so illumine, that appetite in them 

Exhaleth no inordinate desire, 

Still hungering as the rule of temperance wills." 

Still there is growth but it is growth in knowl- 
edge, in power, in self-mastery, in discipline of 
the whole self and all its instruments. 

And later still will come a diminishing in these 
appetites. Knowledge will seem as surfeiting as 
too much oatmeal. Power which cannot bring 
back youth will seem after all futile. 

But still in the healthy soul there will be growth. 
If the physical and intellectual appetites have not 
been gorged, and the self spoiled by over indul- 
gence, there will have been growing, like the slow 

47 



The College of Growth 

growing pines under the first growth of poplar, or 
the second growth of maple and birch, spiritual 
appetites ready to be fed with truth and beauty 
and goodness, of which this world affords just 
enough of a foretaste to whet the appetite and 
leave the soul ready for the full enjoyment of an- 
other sphere. i 

No, so far as the individual is concerned, what- 
ever may, be true of nations or of institutions, to 
discover that we have stopped growing physically 
is not to lay on the shelf that truth of Margaret 
Fuller's, "Very early, I perceived that the object 
of life is to gTow." If you will take this as a key, 
it will unlock many of your college problems. 

Let us say of ourselves and of our college, "our 
object is to grow." The condition of membership 
in the community shall be growth. Whatever 
stunts growth, prematurely ages, dulls appetite, 
throws the human machine out of balance, will be 
excluded so far as possible. Appetite for a cer- 
tain amount of intellectual food will be taken to in- 
dicate a healthy condition and a normal appetite. 
The absence of such appetite will indicate that 
conditions are not favorable to growth and that a 
change of air and of food is desirable. 

Like the tree transplanted from the nursery or 
the radish or the cabbage plant transplanted from 
the family to the isolation of the field you may 
think that you have attained groAvth, because you 
have been pulled up by the roots when you have 
only attained a chance to grow. You may think 
yoii are free as air because you are away by yoTir- 

48 



The College of Growth 

self at college and nothing fastens your roots, but 
unless like the tree, and the radish and the cabbage 
you can establish new associations, unless your 
roots can take hold of new soil, you will not retain 
even the growth that you now have. Cabbages 
start life well gregariously, but if you want all 
round development, if you want your cabbage 
plant to head, you must transplant it at the right 
period and you must give it enough isolation, 
enough freedom from other members of the same 
family, to permit the expansion to the full of all 
that is within it. Men are not unlike cabbages. 
Transplanting often produces astonishing results. 
If students are to continue to grow, however, 
the college itself must grow, but not necessarily in 
numbers, as the students need not necessarily grow 
in stature. To be a young man^s college, as 
Lafayette is by name and nature, means to be a 
growing college, a college of change and adapta- 
tion. Some times just as young men who come to 
college think they are full grown, so the college 
makes the mistake of thinking that it is a com- 
munity of grown-up men, of students and faculty 
who have attained growth, who know what is good, 
and true and beautiful, and who have no need for 
change and experiment. This is to lose what is 
best in college life. Faculty and students are ad- 
venturers together in the fields of knowledge. 
The atmosphere of the college must be expecta- 
tion, exploitation. The faculty are not keepers of 
a safe deposit vault from which they bring forth 
for the new generation treasures, new and old, but 

49 



The College of Growth 

gardeners in a garden of life. On all sides of the 
college campus there should be gates over which 
should hang signs bidding welcome to anything 
that comes with a face not seen before. Stored as 
its warehouses are with all that thought and ex- 
perience have found worth while in the past, nour- 
ished from this inexhaustible store, the college 
does not shrink from the strange or unexpected. 
Its life stands in no precariously balanced equi- 
librium, ready to lose its balance at an unexpected 
shock from any quarter. Its life is a life of 
motion, of growth, of assimilation; it grasps and 
uses the new, and swings it to its own ends. Prove 
all things, hold fast that which is good is the motto 
of the college for young men. 

Soil and site are important for- the college of 
growth. The soil here is Presbyterian. In the 
future, as in the past, Lafayette will declare itself 
frankly Presbyterian, and stand in religion, in 
education, in government, for those ideals of in- 
telligence, independent judgment, representative 
government, duty, tolerance, cooperation, and the 
divine significance and purpose of the world with 
which ideals the name has been associated 
throughout the history of modern times. It is 
hoped that its Presbyterianism will be shown also 
by the fact that in the future, as in the past, 
young men of all denominations will find them- 
selves equally welcome and able to live in com- 
plete accord and mutual respect. 

As to site, it is well for the college of growth 
to stand somewhat back from the village street, 

50 



The College of Growth 

or, better still, on a somewhat inaccessible hill. 
Talent grows best in quiet. The world is too 
much with us, early and late we lay waste our 
powers, if the college stands where it is overrun 
with the currents of the day hurrying on their 
petty errands. Not every scarehead of the day's 
news is worth the attention of the college of 
growth, not every passing bubble, but only those 
irresistible, swelling tides which creep almost un- 
observed up the hillside, only those goings of the 
winds of the spirit w^hich shake the treetops, not 
the litter in the gutter, only the clouds which those 
not too intimate with the affairs of the day, detect 
on the horizon, and which all appreciate, but ap- 
preciate too late, when the cyclone is whirling on 
the pavement. 

Where the college boy shall live within college 
walls, particularly where the freshman shall live, 
is a much debated question. Dormitory versus 
fraternity house is a subject of debate with much 
to be said on both sides. If there is more democ- 
racy and wider acquaintanceship in the dormitory, 
there is more of home, more elder brother solici- 
tude, more security from hazing, more of the disci- 
pline of fagging, in the fraternity house. Here 
again we may apply our touchstone and ask but 
where does the boy grow more? To this my an- 
swer is, the freshman grows more in the dormi- 
tory, and I trust the time will come at Lafayette 
when fraternities will have no rooms for fresh- 
men. A fraternity house is a home, only on a 
little larger scale than the freshman has just left. 

51 



The College of Growth 

The freshman needs a wider experience. He 
needs to know men not of his own kind, or social 
station or similar tastes, but men of as many dif- 
ferent kinds as he can come into contact with, if 
he is to understand the world. When he has an 
opportunity to know two hundred men, it is a pity 
that he should hmit himself to twenty. More com- 
fortable he may be in the fraternity house, but 
still more comfortable would he probably be at 
home. Growth in the directions stimulated by 
fraternity life will come as well in the last three 
years. The cruder, more elemental growth, which 
will come from the democracy of dormitory life 
must come first, if it is to come at all. My answer, 
therefore, to the question, where should the fresh- 
man live, is in the dormitory if he wants to grow. 
To the question, should the student join a frater- 
nity my answer is, yes, if he can afford it, and 
wants to grow in capacity for friendship, for close 
fellowship with men, and in the amenities of life 
among gentlemen. 

No freshman class ever entered an American 
college at a more interesting time. The world is 
convulsed and from its bitter throes a new era will 
be born, of which era you, if you do not stop 
growing, will be a part. 

To quote the Divine Comedy again : "It was an 
hour, when he who climbs, had need to walk un- 
crippled. ' ^ 

However irresponsible youth may be, however 
unconscious may be the growth they experience in 
college, the college itself, true to its name again, 

52 



The College of Growth 

cannot forget that life is serious, and that the 
more difficult conditions of our American civiliza- 
tion, unpurged of dross by the consuming fire of 
war, demand sterner discipline, both intellectual 
and moral, if her youth are to be adequately pre- 
pared to play their part in the world of to-mor- 
row. 

The first consideration, however, will be to give 
the student room to grow. To show him enough 
so that he may see more, to open unimagined 
vistas, to stir new questionings, to kindle new im- 
agination, to give him technical skill and accuracy 
in the use of the tools of knowledge, language and 
mathematics. 

But, above all, so to balance the requirements of 
the curriculum that the student may not only not 
rust from lack of study, but may also not be too 
busy studying to think, or to learn the more val- 
uable lessons of reflection, and profit by that illum- 
ination which comes with fellowship and the inter- 
change of opinion. 

Whatever makes for the full development of the 
student, for his growth in body, in physical 
strength, in resources of soul, in aspiration of, the 
spirit, in accurate knowledge, in technical skill, in 
command of the methods of securing knowledge 
and of the tests for separating true knowledge 
from false, will have full recognition in the life of 
the growing college. 

There is danger, of course, in letting the fresh- 
men know that they have come to college to grow. 
There is danger that like children they will be 

53 



The College of Growth 

pulling their cabbages and radishes up by the 
roots to see how they progress, and will become 
disgusted that the days have so little to show of 
visible growth. 

The best growth comes, of course, unconsciously. 
What man, by taking thought, can add even a cubit 
to his stature, and how much less can a man be- 
come wise by watching himself become so? 

Freshmen given this secret of college life and 
purpose will be tempted to judge for themselves 
that to spend so much time over mathematics or 
Latin, or German, is to narrow the spirit, to bind 
it with the commonplace and the dullness of 
routine, so that it will become hopelessly cramped 
and misshapen. They will try to devise aero- 
planes on which the soul can soar to freer atmos- 
pheres and avoid the toilsome footpath. I recog- 
nize this danger, and I can but warn you to look 
back over the way you have come and ask your- 
self how far your conscious care and invention 
have added to your stature, and by what thought 
you have shortened the years required to reach 
your six feet or even five foot eight. 

Then recall that what is here offered for your 
further equipment and growth represents the con- 
sensus of many minds of many generations, and 
m.ust have shown itself some way worth while 
through the centuries. 

On the other hand, the world is growing, too, 
and suitable culture proved suitable by one gen- 
eration may not be the best possible for another 
generation. No faculty of a growing college ever 

54 



The College of Growth 

reaches that felicitous state of mind of the manu- 
facturer, who advertises, we could not improve 
the soap, so we improved the box; we could not 
improve the tobacco, so we give it to you in paper, 
instead of tinfoil; we could not improve the tooth 
paste, so we make the slit of the tube flat, instead 
of round. They believe that the content of the 
college course as well as the method is susceptible 
of improvement, though some may add, but they 
would like to see the man that could convince them 
of the desirableness of substituting any new sub- 
ject for the old tried branch. 

We build a new chapel not because we feel that 
the spirit of worship cannot be improved, and 
therefore we improve the house of worship, but be- 
cause it expresses our desire to improve the spirit 
of worship. We put the catalogue into new type 
not because the content of the old catalogue can- 
not be improved and therefore we improve the 
wrapping, but on the theory that new wine should 
go into new bottles. We hope some day to build 
a new gymnasium, not because we expect the 
freshmen of to-morrow to prove necessarily of 
greater prowess than the freshmen of yesterday, 
but because we believe that the athletic spirit and 
achievements of Lafayette should receive worthy 
recognition for the deeds of the past, and every 
encouragement for the future. 

The best you can do, if you feel that you are 
not growing as you should, is to make sure that 
you are in a college of growth, with men on the 
lookout for the new, and with courage to use what 

55 



The College of Growth 

experiment justifies, and then be content to grow 
along with your growing college. 

You may remember the experience of Alice as 
she tried to buy the Qgg of knowledge from the 
sheep in Looking Glass land. Alice was back 
again in the little dark shop. ''I should like to 
buy an egg, please," she said timidly; "how do 
you sell them ? " * ' Five pence farthing for one ; 
twopence for two," the sheep replied. "Then 
two are cheaper than one?" Alice said in a sur- 
prised tone, taking out her purse. "Only you 
must eat them both, if you buy two," said the 
sheep. "I'll have one please," said Alice, as she 
put the money down on the counter, for she 
thought to herself, they might n 't be at all nice, 
you know. The sheep took the money and put it 
away in a box, then said, "I never put things into 
people's hands — that would never do — you must 
get it for yourself." And so saying, the sheep 
went off to the other end of the shop and set the 
Qgg upright on a shelf. "I wonder why it 
wouldn't do," thought Alice as she groped her 
way among the tables and chairs, for the shop 
was very dark towards the end. "The Qgg seems 
to get further away the more I walk towards it. 
Let me see, is this a chair? Why, it 's got 
branches, I declare ! How very odd to find trees 
growing here. And actually, here 's a little brook ! 
Well, this is the very queerest shop I ever saw." 
So she went on wondering more and more at every 
step, as everything turned into a tree the moment 
she came up to it ! 

56 



The College of Growth 

If you have come to Lafayette with any idea 
that it is a shop where you can put your money 
on the counter -and have your egg of knowledge 
delivered into your hand, I trust you may have the 
same experience as AKce. First find that two 
eggs are sold cheaper than one, but only on con- 
dition that you eat both eggs. Second, that you 
must get the eggs off the shelf for yourself; and 
third, that you will find everything you come in 
contact with on your way to the shelf, whether 
chairs of German, or history, or any branch of 
knowledge or faculty or students, like trees grow- 
ing, so will you know that you have come to a 
young man's college, and to a college of growth. 



57 



LIBERTY AND COOPERATION 

IT is customary for the president to say a word 
of welcome at this time to the newcomers both 
in the faculty and in the student body. We ex- 
pect at least a quarter of the students to be 
strangers each fall, but it does not often happen, 
as is the case this year, that a quarter of the 
faculty are newcomers, also. It is the beginning 
of a new era for Lafayette as it is for the world 
outside, and it is with some seriousness, there- 
fore, mindful of all that it may mean for the 
future of this splendid old institution, that I bid 
you all welcome to Lafayette and express the 
earnest hope that we may all be better acquainted 
in the near future, share a mutual confidence in 
one another, and be firmly bound together in the 
earnest resolve to make this a society of scholars 
known for its loyalty to whatsoever things are 
true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report. 
We are glad you come in such large numbers. 
The war is over, but the tasks before the Republic 
are great. It is a good omen that after the heart- 
searchings and world visions of war, so many of 
our young men should seek better mental equip- 
ment in preference to the present tempting wages 
in industry. 

Some one, I think it was the Scientist in Lowes 



Address at the opening of Lafayette College, September, 1919. 

.?8 



Liberty and Cooperation 

Dickinson's '^ Modern Symposium," has said, 
that since Biology entered the scientific field, and 
we began to think biologically, the thought of the 
world has been necessarily optimistic, and directed 
to the future rather than to the past, because it is 
always the coming generation in which Biology is 
interested. ' ' The series of births is the vehicle of 
progress. It is this discovery that gives to our 
outlook on life its exhilaration and zest. Our 
eyes are on the coming generations ; in them cen- 
ters our hope and our duty. ' ' 

No biologist can think of the golden age as in the 
past, nor of the future as darker than the present, 
because if such were his creed, his duty would be 
to curtail and cut off life rather than to encourage 
it, and his science a science of death rather than of 
life. 

However true this may be of biologists in gen- 
eral, it is certainly true of any college community 
worthy of the name, that they think biologically in 
this respect, that their hopes are always in the 
future, and that they preserve an unquenchable 
optimism as to the superior possibilities of each 
new lot of freshmen. The high hopes with which 
you enter this new world, therefore, find their 
counterpart in the high hopes of the faculty for 
what you are, and for what you are destined to 
accomplish. 

In a spirit of optimism in spite of the lowering 
clouds in the world about us, therefore, I have 
taken as the subject of the few remarks I shall 
make this morning, "Liberty and Cooperation," 

59 



Liberty and Cooperation 

two ideals in which we all believe, but which we 
sometimes find it difficult to reconcile with each 
other, and which appear just now to be locking 
horns in inevitable conflict. 

I often wish that the inventor who some day 
will give us an apparatus for projecting the 
thoughts of men on a screen, would make haste 
with his invention, in order that we might have 
some true picture on an occasion like this, of the 
thoughts, the feelings, the hopes, the fears, the de- 
sires and doubts with which you freshmen step 
into the college world. We of the faculty, it is 
true, have all passed through similar experiences, 
but the impressions fade like an old photograph 
and lose their clearness and sharpness of outline. 
I have sometimes wondered whether the flights of 
steps that lead up the hill to Pardee ever speak to 
men's souls as the sacred stairs at Eome spoke to 
Luther, saying, ''The just shall live by faith,'' 
or as the steps of our capitol at Washington spoke 
to John Stuart Mill of a treatise on Liberty. For, 
as he tells us in his autobiography, "It was in 
mounting the steps of the capitol that the thought 
first arose of converting my short essay on Liberty 
into a volume." That these steps will some day 
speak some such great word to some man, I have 
no question. Perhaps it has been spoken to some 
one of you new men to-day. 

There is significance in the fact that we say a 
man enters college, goes into college, but goes out 
to work, goes up to the University (as they say 
of Oxford or Cambridge) but goes down to the 

60 



Liberty and Cooperation 

office, and we have to rely somewhat in the absence 
of our projection machine on such incidental hints 
of attitudes of minds. In the same way we notice 
a slight shift in the center of interest in the fact 
that an Englishman says, ' ' Shall we go in to din- 
ner?" while an American says, "Shall we go out 
to dinner?" I should like to find, if I could, some 
such revealing hints this morning, as to how many 
of you freshmen think of coming to college, as a 
stepping out into a larger place, and how many of 
you think of it, as entering into restricting walls. 

Last year, when to enter college was to enter the 
Students' Army Training Corps as a soldier of the 
United States, your predecessors may perhaps 
have thought that they were thereby restricting 
their freedom and placing themselves under 
orders. At the same time they may have thought 
they were thereby exercising the greatest liberty 
they had ever enjoyed, the liberty of saying, ''All 
that I am or hope to be, even life itself, I lay on 
the altar of a great cause." 

Probably you have not thought very much about 
the subject as yet. You will, I hope, think more 
about it the next four years, and I shall be glad 
if any questions I may raise here to-day shall 
start you to thinking regarding this question of 
liberty. 

The whole world to-day is concerned with this 
question, Under what conditions can I enjoy 
liberty f If I am constrained, what constrains me ? 
Is liberty or power the greater good? If I don't 
want to be ruled, ought I to rule others? May a 

61 



Liberty and Cooperation 

minority set any bounds to the power of a major- 
ity to rule in a democracy? May each organized 
trade exploit society for its own benefit and be 
the judge of its own necessities? May an organ- 
ized trade deny any free citizen the right to work 
at that trade except as a member of the organiza- 
tion and under such terms and conditions as the 
organization may prescribe? These are questions 
which are convulsing the whole world to-day. 
They are questions which go to the root of life 
and questions which all thinking men must face. 

For a college bearing the name of Lafayette 
the natural watchword is Liberty. Never was 
there a more consistent believer in human liberty. 
Never was there a man less influenced by circum- 
stance. What was good for the French and Amer- 
ican was in his eyes good for the Irishman or the 
Dutchman. Much as he admired Napoleon's 
ability to rule, he felt he must join the opposition 
when Napoleon proposed to exercise that power 
to the detriment of human liberty. Champion of 
the people as he was, he defended the king when 
the mob sought to substitute mob violence for law. 

Liberty is a good watchword, and I trust it 
will be an ideal for which this college will always 
fight, no matter Avhat other ideals other institu- 
tions may champion. I think it may be well, how- 
ever, for us to stop a moment to-day and consider 
our ideal in the light of another ideal very popu- 
lar just now and an ideal whose worth I would be 
the last to deny. This is the ideal of cooperation. 
The late war was a war of allies, on both sides. 

62 



Liberty and Cooperation 

Both sides claimed the name. The allied German 
people tried to insist that the other group was 
only an entente, not a real alliance. Both sides, 
however much they differed on other things, were 
agreed that allies was a name of which to be 
proud. 

Of nothing in her share in the war does Amer- 
ica boast more than of her readiness to cooperate, 
and of the fact that it was America that insisted 
that all should fight under a unified command. 

The great Y. M. C. A. boasted of the spirit of 
cooperation, and the growing admiration for co- 
operation finally found expression in the United 
Drive for money for Y. M. C. A., Knights of Co- 
lumbus, Jewish Welfare, etc. Finally America 
favors a League of Nations — and is ready to go 
farther than her Republican Senators imagine in 
subordinating independence to cooperation. 

At the same time we have watched the growth 
of the great labor brotherhoods and trade unions 
and federations. We have admired the willing- 
ness of the individual, especially the more ambi- 
tious and gifted individual, to join a union, to 
limit his earnings so that they shall not exceed 
those of his weaker brother, to spend if need be 
his savings that strikes may be won and the gen- 
eral conditions of all his craft improved. We 
have watched the creation of a sentiment which 
brands a man as an outcast who has no union 
card, just as the sentiment of patriotism brands 
as outcast the man without a country, or as the 

63 



Liberty and Cooperation 

inquisition branded as outcast the man who would 
not think as the Catholic church thought. 

We have seen in our colleges and universities 
the growth of friendliness and cooperation. 
There is not the same hot political rivalry between 
fraternity and non-fraternity men that there once 
was. Faculty and students dress and look alike. 
Community sentiment is more important than in- 
dividual opinion and becomes more tyrannous and 
exacting. No freshman can successfully struggle 
against the freshman cap edict, and irreconcilable s 
are almost unknown to-day in college communities. 

''The plague of uniformity has descended upon 
our colleges" as Robert Louis Stevenson said 
some years ago, and we find the ideal of individual 
liberty at a discount, the ideal of cooperation and 
group conformity at a premium. 

It is rather important for us to know, therefore, 
what it is you expect to find in college, whether 
you look forward to enjoying liberty, or whether 
you are thinking how worthwhile it is to belong, 
to belong first to a college with so honored a name 
as Lafayette, to belong to the largest class which 
ever entered, to belong perhaps to this or that 
fraternity, or team, literary society, or boarding 
club. 

You have probably heard that one of the great 
advantages of going to college is the associations 
and friendships that you form, the unconscious 
lessons in cooperation which you receive. If in- 
dividual liberty is uppermost in your thought, you 

64 



Liberty and Cooperation 

are probably wondering how far you will be let 
alone, how far the plans of your classmates, col- 
lege traditions, officious sophomores, the faculty, 
the Dean, laws and regulations will mar the pleas- 
ure of being your own master and of testing out 
your various powers in a broader world of experi- 
ence than any you have yet known. 

If some one asks you to cooperate, to join with 
others for some good end, your natural question 
will be, what becomes of liberty if I cooperatie'? 
For that matter, what becomes of liberty if I make 
an engagement with one friend, much more if I 
maintain intimate relations with six or eight? If 
I bind myself by a promise to be at March Field 
at three, it is obvious I thereby lose the liberty 
to be at the Circle at the same hour. If I am for 
liberty, ought I not to stay outside a fraternity 
lest my freedom be restricted thereby"? If I am a 
fraternity man is it not a descent from my lofty 
isolation if I attend a debate or allow any interests 
which do not center in the fraternity to command 
a share of my time f 

We know that the fathers of our country were 
enthusiastic believers in both liberty and in union. 
The two ideals did not appear to them incompat- 
ible. How is it then, that in our own day, men 
seem to be withdrawing into two camps, over one 
of which floats the banner of individual freedom, 
while over the other floats the equally attractive 
banner of cooperation and fraternity. How is it, 
that men are asking themselves to-day, how shall 
T harmonize my ideals of liberty and of coopera- 

65 



Liberty and Cooperation 

tion? What are the rights of the individual as 
over against the desires and judgments of his 
group ? Ought a man to try to be a good man, or 
is it enough to be a good student, a good fraternity 
brother, a good American, a good policeman, a 
good railway conductor, a good and loyal member 
of his union? Is one necessary or supplementary 
to the other, or are they at times mutually exclu- 
sive? Is there any universal loyalty, higher than 
the loyalty to the group, to the trade-union, to the 
college, to the nation? Oan we be like the Stoics 
good citizens of the world without also being good 
Romans, or if the two conflict which is the more 
important, to be a good American or to be a good 
covenanter. The trade-unionist says, why should 
it be thought any greater hardship that a man can- 
not escape membership in a trade-union and be 
governed by the union 's laws, than that he cannot 
escape citizenship of a country and be subject to 
the country's laws? If nativity carries with it 
membership in the state, why should not occupa- 
tion carry with it membership in the union? 
There was a time when the church claimed also 
that to be a citizen of a Christian country was ipso 
facto to be a subject of the church. Why was it 
that man rejected this doctrine in the name of 
freedom, and was Protestantism in religion and 
the claim of the right of individual determination 
in matters of religion a step in the right direction, 
or was it a mistake brought about by a lack of 
spirit of cooperation and unity? 
When may a man rebel against a trade-union 

66 



Liberty and Cooperation 

and set up an economic protestantism, and in so 
doing be only fighting the age long fight of free- 
dom, and not be accused of betraying the interests 
of the many for his own selfish benefit? When 
may a man stand up and defy a college tradition as 
some have done at Princeton and Yale, and in so 
doing, be doing right and an admirable thing, and 
when ought he to be decried as uprooting old tra- 
ditions, and setting up his own judgment, like a 
conceited ass in opposition to the will of the great 
majority? Is there any test of the nobility of the 
action save the test of success — if he wins he is a 
hero, if he fails he is a traitor and a rebel? Is a 
scab necessarily to be despised as a large part of 
our world thinks, or may there be nobleness in 
his action, and the man himself good stuff for 
citizenship in a free republic? 

Is it true, as Mill says, that we must recognize 
the importance to man and society of a large 
variety in types of character, and of giving full 
freedom to human nature to expand itself in in- 
numerable and conflicting directions? Ought the 
majority always to rule? Ought the students to 
rule the college because they outnumber the 
faculty? Ought we to go to the same logical ex- 
tremes as in Eussia and put it to the vote of the 
students what they will study, with the result that 
mathematics is omitted and dancing included, and 
that the class begins when the majority get tired 
of recess play? Shall we attempt nothing in gov- 
ernment which the man on the street cannot un- 
derstand and does not approve? Shall we teach 

67 



Liberty and Cooperation 

nothing that the majority of the people do not 
want their children to learn? Shall we allow a 
well organized minority to prescribe what we shall 
study as they prescribe at what hour we shall get 
up, and what we shall drink? Is there no occupa- 
tion for the freedom of idle hours, but to devise 
schemes for forcing more pay from our fellows, 
and for imposing our will upon our fellowmen? 

Is the freedom to which we invite the oppressed 
of the world a freedom to confiscate the fruits of 
toil, to put the ignorant in command, and to exalt 
the man without conscience or truth to the places 
of leadership? Is the sovereignty which our Re- 
publican senators are so afraid we may lose the 
right to do what we please, or only the right to 
do what is right? 

Was not liberty perhaps a perquisite of a new 
country, where there was room for a man like 
Patrick Henry to swing his arms and declaim, 
' ' Give me liberty or give me death, ' ' and have we 
not become now too congested especially in our 
large cities, for any one to enjoy much liberty of 
action, without hurting a neighbor? Could two 
million people ride daily in the subways of New 
York if any considerable number of them were de- 
votees of personal liberty and not rather as meek 
and unresisting as the dumb cattle which night 
after night fall into their places at milking time? 

What about this Democracy of which we have 
heard so much of late, and of which Lecky said 
prophetically twenty-five years ago — ''I do not 
think that any one who seriously considers the 

68 



Liberty and Cooperation 

force and universality of the movement of our 
generation in the direction of democracy can doubt 
that this conception of government will neces- 
sarily, at least for a considerable time, dominate 
in all civiKzed countries, and the real question for 
politicians is the form it is likely to take, and the 
means by which its characteristic evils can be best 
mitigated. As we have, I think, abundantly seen, 
a tendency to democracy does not mean a tendency 
to parliamentary government, or even a tendency 
towards greater liberty. On the contrary, strong 
arguments may be adduced, both from history, and 
from the nature of things, to show that democ- 
racy may often prove the direct opposite of liberty. 
Equality is the idol of democracy, but with the in- 
finitely various capacities and energies of men, 
this can only be attained by a constant, systematic 
stringent repression of their natural development. 
Whenever natural forces have unrestricted play, 
inequality is certain to ensue. Democracy de- 
stroys the balance of opinions, interests, and 
classes, on which constitutional liberty mainly 
depends, and its constant tendency is to impair 
the efficiency and authority of parliaments, which 
have hitherto proved the chief organs of political 
liberty. In our own day, no fact is more incon- 
testable and conspicuous than the love of democ- 
racy for authoritative regulation. 

* ' The industrial organization to which the trade- 
unions aspire approaches far more nearly to that 
of the Middle Ages or of the Tudors than to the 
ideals of Jefferson and Cobden. I do not here- 

69 



Liberty and Cooperation 

argue whether this tendency is good or bad. No 
one at least can suppose that it is in the direction 
of freedom. It may be permitted to doubt 
whether Uberty in other forms is likely to be very 
secure if power is mainly placed in the hands of 
men, who, in their own sphere, value it so little." 

The time is too short for me to attempt any 
very complete answer to the questions I have 
raised. I shall be content if I have provoked ques- 
tions in some of you, and have sent you to the 
library for Lecky or John Stuart Mill or Lowes 
Dickinson. Even Euclid, however, sometimes 
offers hints as to the direction in which a solution 
may be found, and with a similar purpose in view 
I want to call your attention to three or four 
truths which seem to me to help toward a solution 
of the conflicting claims of the ideals of liberty 
and of fraternity or cooperation. 

The first is that we mislead ourselves when we 
talk of Liberty with a capital L, instead of liber- 
ties. There is no such thing as Liberty in the ab- 
stract. Even Patrick Henry when he said. Give 
me Liberty or give me Death, did not mean Liberty 
in general, but the liberty then in question, free- 
dom from English rule. No man has ever attained 
complete freedom, complete independence. We 
have won, humanity has won by its struggles 
through the ages certain liberties, freedom from 
slavery, freedom to sell his services in an open 
market, freedom to worship and to think in re- 
ligious matters as his conscience dictates, freedom 
of opinion, freedom to learn and to know. Some 

70 



Liberty and Cooperation 

of these liberties are held precariously, some are 
more in peril to-day than others. Not all the 
world would join even with Bums in his defense 
of that fundamental liberty : 

"Here's freedom to him. that wad read, 
Here 's freedom to him that wad write, 
There 's nane ever feared that the truth should be heard 
But them whom the truth wad indite. ' ' 

While we have seen this summer even in enlight- 
ened America that when men's passions are roused 
their faith wanes in that creed so well stated by 
Mazzini: ''God has given you thought; no one 
has the right to restrain it, or to forbid the ex- 
pression of it, which is the communion of your 
soul with the soul of your brothers and the only 
way of progress which we have. The press must 
be absolutely free; the rights of the intellect are 
inviolable and any preventive censorship is 
tyranny. 

''Peaceful association is sacred like thought. 
God planted the tendency in you as a perennial 
means of progress, a pledge of that unity which 
the human family is destined one day to attain; 
no power has any right to impede or limit it." 

When we shut a man up in prison we say we 
have deprived him of his liberty, but Bunyan los- 
ing the liberty to walk in England and to dispose 
of his physical person, discovered thereby the 
liberty to write and to walk the road to immortal 
fame. 

It will help us then in our efforts to think out 

71 



Liberty and Cooperation 

the proper relations of liberty and cooperation, 
if we talk of liberties rather than of liberty in the 
abstract. The trades unionist feels that he is in- 
creasing the liberties of men by fighting to wrest 
the control of industry from capital and captains 
of industry and place it in the hands of the leaders 
of the majority of those participating in that par- 
ticular industry; that thus the individual work- 
man will have the greatest freedom in determining 
the circumstances of his labor. The owner of 
property, on the other hand, feels that if he loses 
the right of peaceful possession and control of 
property, freedom no longer exists and he has lost 
one of the most cherished of his liberties, a liberty 
for which the Anglo-Saxon has fought long and 
bitterly. 

Not all liberties are equally desirable, and some 
smaller liberties must be sacrificed to greater free- 
doms. When we argue for liberty, therefore, let 
us be careful to define the liberty we have in mind. 
The idea of liberty and its applications will grow 
from generation to generation and develop accord- 
ing to changed conditions. In general, however, 
we may say with Dickinson, "The liberty that is 
desirable is that of good people pursuing Good in 
order — and the order that is desirable is that of 
good people pursuing Good in liberty," or with 
Mazzini, "Your liberty will be sacred so long as 
it develops under the ruling influence of the idea 
of Duty and of faith in the common perfectibility. 
Your liberty will flourish protected by God and by 
men, so long as you regard it not as the right to 

72 



Liberty and Cooperation 

use and to abuse your faculties in any direction 
which it pleases you to choose, but as the right 
to choose freely and according to your special 
tendencies a means of doing good." 

If the first principle is to distinguish liberties, 
the second principle is that liberty, like life itself, 
must die in order to live. In the field of liberty 
as elsewhere we run up against that paradox of 
biology that living is dying. If we seal up the 
body hermetically so that there will be no decay, 
there will also be no life. If we decline to use our 
liberty for fear we may thereby incur obligation 
and become less free, our liberty is only potential, 
not actual. It becomes like the money of the miser 
— useless. 

Liberty is the power to say yes or no, to turn 
to the right or left, but it is not the power to turn 
right and left at the same time, nor the power to 
enjoy the consequence of turning left if you have 
actually turned right. Liberty after it has been 
used is about as significant as gunpowder after it 
has been exploded, or the stick of a rocket after 
the flight. Like money, therefore, liberty may be 
overrated. Unlike money, the more one spends, 
the more rapidly is one^s store replenished. 

You have come to college to be free, at least 
I hope you have. You have come to rid yourselves 
of all that fetters your freedom, bodily weakness, 
intellectual sloth, ignorance, mental blindness, de- 
pendence upon the eyes and brains of others. If, 
however, you are so greedy of your new-found 
freedom, that you hesitate to do anything for fear 

73 



Liberty and Cooperation 

you may commit yourself and thereby shackle 
your freedom — if your attitude of mind is that of 
the little girl portrayed in a recent novel, who was 
called ^'Shant" because her favorite response was 
"Shant if I don't want to," you have made the 
great mistake of confounding means and end, the 
tool and the job, the uniform and the cause. 

When freedom meets cooperation, therefore, it 
is true that if it cooperates some liberties are de- 
stroyed, but it is also true that if it refuses to ex- 
ercise its freedom to cooperate it has thereby ar- 
bitrarily restricted its field of action. 

Third — Cooperation is a worthy ideal. Love of 
f ellowmen, willingness to work with and for fellow- 
men, readiness to subordinate personal advantage 
to the public welfare, the spirit of the fraternity, 
the clan, the trades-union, the nation, the league, 
these are great ideals. Cooperation is, however, 
in our day perhaps likely to be overestimated 
rather than underestimated. The town meeting 
was never a very efficient form of government. 
Democracy, we think, is worth what it costs, but it 
is a terribly expensive method of educating men in 
freedom. If the voice of the people is the voice 
of God, it also is true that mobs are notoriously 
fickle and foolish. 

The devotee of cooperation some times forgets 
that the greatest apostle of Democracy, Jesus 
Christ himself, or Thomas Jefferson were great 
individualists. Jesus allowed no friend, not his 
own disciples, neither the secular nor religious au- 
thorities of his time, to swerve him from the task 

74 



Liberty and Cooperation 

he had set himself, to hurry him toward it, or to 
hinder him from accomplishing it. 

Thomas Jefferson, the great apostle of the 
rights of man, built his house on a hill top for 
solitude, and arranged underground corridors so 
that his thoughts should not be disturbed by the 
sight of his servants passing to and fro, while he 
could look down and see in the dim distance the 
university which his individual thought and genius 
were shaping in its minutest detail, taking visible 
form. 

The truth of the matter is that cooperation is 
good if those who cooperate are worth while. If 
you multiply zero by a thousand or ten thousand 
or a hundred thousand you make no advance. 
The great danger in our colleges and in our re- 
public to-day is the assumption that if enough 
people favor a thing it must be right or worth- 
while ; that if enough people get together you have 
an army or a political party, irrespective of the 
ability or genius which the group includes ; that a 
great leader in a democracy need not be a great 
individual, or a willful man, had indeed best not 
have any private convictions or opinions, but 
strive only with ear to the ground to hear the 
popular voice, and in action to register the popu- 
lar will. 

It was no mere chance that of the men we hon- 
ored with honorary degrees at our last commence- 
ment three of the eight had not attended college, 
and I regard it as the strongest argument against 
college education to-day, that the spirit of cooper- 

75 



Liberty and Cooperation 

ation is so rife, that there is little encouragement 
to a man to think for himself, or to stand heroi- 
cally for his own convictions. Democracy does 
not know what is good for it and never has. More 
than any form of government it requires great 
individuals, strong and gifted leaders, and yet all 
its efforts are bent on destroying the man who is 
different, who exhibits genius or originality or 
power. 

Finally, cooperation implies at least two inde- 
pendent parties. If we believe in cooperation we 
must desire that capital and labor shall be fairly 
evenly matched. If capital is too strong, or if 
labor is too strong, there will not be cooperation. 
A servant may give a master loyal service, but he 
can hardly be said to cooperate. 

If men are forced by intimidation or armed 
troops to join a labor-union it ceases to be a co- 
operative society and becomes a despotism. Co- 
operation presupposes freedom and is possible 
only for free men. This is the cardinal principle 
which must be borne in mind by all voluntary 
organizations, whether it be church, or trades- 
union or societies of scholars. When the tyranny 
of an organization proceeds so far as to destroy 
the characteristic type of which it was formed, 
when its constituent members are no longer free 
and equal, but cowed by force or blinded and be- 
guiled by deluding flattery, it has ceased to be a 
cooperating society and has become a dominion. 
You must be on your watch against this tendency 
of cooperation, to destroy the thing it loves, to 

76 



Liberty and Cooperation 

kill that liberty which alone makes cooperation 
possible. 

If then liberty finds expression in cooperation, 
and if cooperation and fraternization are only pos- 
sible between men who enjoy liberty, we see that 
the two ideals are not, as appears at first sight, 
contradictory alternatives, bnt rather supplemen- 
tary the one to the other, and that they only come 
in conflict when pressed too far. 

The two have, however, a common enemy which 
often wears the cloak of one or the other. The 
common enemy is the lust of power. The fight 
to-day between trades-unions and capital is not 
a. fight for higher wages or more things to eat 
or to Avear or to own. It is a fight for power. 
Against the lust for power the spirit of liberty 
and the spirit of cooperation, the individualist, 
and the socialist can join hands in a common 
cause. 

The good man is as thirsty for power as the 
bad man. The prohibitionist exults in the polit- 
ical power he wields for good, quite as much as 
the liquor seller in the political power he wields 
for evil. The greatest crimes against freedom 
and brotherliness have been committed in the 
name of religion just as we are to-day witnessing 
liberty destroyed in the name of patriotic democ- 
racy. 

The necessities of war remove the sentinels of 
liberty and power is enthroned. Men cooperate in 
a just cause, and demagogues thirsty for power, 
seeing how easy it is to set a hundred millions 

77 



Liberty and Cooperation 

singing one tune, try to continue the experiment 
when the necessity has passed. 

Democracy pressed too far is to-day in danger 
of landing us in the condition so well pictured by 
Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida; 

' ' Force should be ri^ht, or rather right and wrong 

Should lose their names, and so should justice too. 

Between whose endless jar justice resides 

Then everything includes itself in power 

Power into will, will into appetite; 

And appetite, an universal wolf, 

So doubly seconded with will and power, 

Must make perforce an universal prey, 

And last eat up himself. ' ' 

In our own day, when we control the services 
of others by wages rather than by force of arms, 
this lust for power takes chiefly the form of lust 
for wealth or the ability to get or to give greater 
wages. Political power is sought not so much for 
its own sake as because it can be used to determine 
tariffs or wage conditions or railroad rates. It 
is a lust which has leaped all bounds and run mad 
since the war ended. It is important for us as 
students to recognize it as the enemy of both those 
who believe in individual freedom and those who 
believe in cooperative enterprise, and to point it 
out to all as such, just as the students of China 
have been the ones to interpret to the Chinese 
people the true significance of such questions as 
that of Shantung. 

If we identify this lust as the enemy of both 

78 



Liberty and Cooperation 

freedom and cooperation, perhaps even we our- 
selves after a little reflection may decide in the 
words of Stevenson, to "spend a trifle less of this 
thing we call life for money, and indulge our- 
selves a trifle more in the article of freedom." 
We may indeed even reach that state of mind 
which characterized Thoreau as a youth when he 
said, '^To have done anything by which you 
earned money merely is to be idle and worse. ' ' 

Certainly we will be on the watch in our own 
souls against any loss of respect for our fellow- 
men, any disposition to subordinate them to our 
own ends, or to utilize them for our own enjoyment 
to their detriment, for from this spirit in the indi- 
vidual springs the lust for power and tyranny 
which threatens the existence of every state in 
which freedom and fraternity have planned to live. 

And as we look out from this peaceful hill upon 
the boiling cauldron of a world in economic revo- 
lution, we shall go one step further than the most 
enlightened trades-unionists have gone, and be 
prepared to say, ''Not only is it not enough that 
wages be reckoned in money, they must be reck- 
oned in goods if we are really to be better off than 
our fathers," but also ''not only is it not enough 
that we receive due wages in material goods, we 
must be careful that we do not dispose of our 
share of that life which on the highest authority 
we know, neither springs from nor can be meas- 
ured by the amount of things which a man pos- 
sesseth." 

79 



Liberty and Cooperation 

To any who are seeking the key to a successful 
life in the present world welter, I commend th^ 
words written by Huxley to his son on his 18th 
birthday, ' ' The great thing in the world is not so 
much to seek happiness, as to earn peace and self- 
respect. I have not troubled you much with pa- 
ternal didactics, but that bit is 'ower true' and 
worth thinking over" — or even better, the words 
of the greatest teacher of all, ''Seek first the King- 
dom of God, and all these things shall be added 
unto you,'^ for we know that where the Spirit of 
the Lord is, there is liberty, and that the first law 
of his Kingdom is to cooperate in love. 



80 



AEMS AND ARCHIMEDES 

A WELL known college president wrote a book 
a few years ago on ' ' The American College, 
What It Is, and What It May Become. ' ' It never 
occurred to him, however, to say that it might be- 
come a military camp. It must have been some 
strange prophetic instinct which led those early 
Eastonians, founders of a college, to which they 
were giving the name of a Frenchman, to write 
into one clause of the charter, instruction shall be 
given in military science and in the Grerman lan- 
guage. We hope that the military instruction you 
are to receive here this winter will shortly make 
it possible for you to put to good use any knowl- 
edge you may have of Germany or of the language 
spoken within its borders. 

The eyes of the world are now upon Metz, the 
city where according to tradition Lafayette first 
heard of Americans gallant struggle for freedom. 
Curiously enough it was from the Duke of Glouces- 
ter, brother of the British king, that Lafayette 
first heard the tale, a tale told too in ridicule. 
''When I first learnt the subject of the quarrel," 
writes Lafayette, ''my heart espoused warmly the 
cause of liberty 'and I thought of nothing but of 
adding also the aid of my banner." 

Address at the opening of Lafayette College, September 19, 
1918. 

81 



Arms and Archimedes 

So we, too, of the College of Lafayette, think 
to-day of nothing but of adding also the aid of 
our banner. Like Lafayette, we are devotees of 
liberty. In one place Lafayette speaks of some 
schoolboy successes, inspired by the '4ove of 
glory, and somewhat disturbed by love of liberty." 
In another place he says, ''you ask me at about 
what age I first experienced my ^irdent love of 
liberty and glory. At eight years of age my 
heart beat when I heard of a hyena that had done 
some injury and caused still more alarm in our 
neighborhood, and the hope of meeting it, was the 
object of all of my walks." 

''When I arrived at college," says Lafayette, 
"nothing ever interrupted my studies except my 
ardent wish of studying without restraint. I rec- 
ollect with pleasure that when I was to describe 
in rhetoric, a perfect courser, I sacrificed the hope 
of obtaining a premium, and described the perfect 
courser, as the one who on perceiving the whip, 
threw down his rider." 

"We of the colleges, than whom there are none 
more ardent lovers of liberty, welcome the 
Students' Army Training Corps, because it is 
based on the principle of mutual cooperation be- 
tween the school and the army, and because we be- 
lieve we shall thus advance liberty in the world. 
Like the perfect courser admired of Lafayette it 
is quite conceivable that should the colleges of 
America perceive the whip, they too would throw 
down their rider. 

We welcome you then to both academic and 

82 



Arms and Archimedes 

military training. For tlie first time, a college 
president may properly begin as Vergil began his 
^neid : — 

" Arma virumque cano . . ." 

I speak of arms and the man; with the arms 
first, capitalized and emphasized. For the first 
time the students of Lafayette are, or soon will be, 
soldiers first and students second. Nevertheless 
truth remains the same, and what was sound mo- 
rality or accurate scie-nce, or good psychology yes- 
terday, is the same to-day. It is not always the 
thing that strikes the eye first that is the most 
important. If you read on in Vergil you will dis- 
cover, that while arms stand first, and have the 
emphasis in the first line, in the second line arms 
are already forgotten, and the verse goes on to 
talk, not about arms, nor about ' ' the arms which, ' ' 
but about ''the man who.^' 

So you will find it here at Lafayette, I trust, this 
year also, for all the outward military show. 
Though we may try to conceal individuality by 
uniform, though you will no longer be able to rec- 
ognize a freshman by his cap, though all classes 
will wear the same olive drab hat cord, and the 
only external difference between a locomotive 
engineer and a student of Latin be the difference 
between a blue hat cord and an olive drab one, we 
hope that you will find a college unit different from 
a cantonment in this, that while the song of both 
begins ''Arms and the Man," the college unit will 
go on to the second line, and place the emphasis 
upon "the man, who." 

83 ; 



Arms and Archimedes 

We shall continue to talk here of men, not of 
man power. We shall try to distinguish men here 
according to their several virtues and aptitudes. 
We shall seek to sift men with more discrimination 
than is possible even with the carefid personnel 
system at the large camps, and we shall try to 
adapt means to ends, with a little more differentia- 
tion than is possible in the rough and ready, hurly 
burly of shaping three million men into an army 
of trained soldiers. You are to be congratulated, 
therefore, on your status as prospective members 
of the Students' Army Training Corps, stripped 
as the status is, of the freedom and luxuries of 
other years. 

I do not propose to discuss this morning, much 
as I am tempted to do so, the causes, the aims, or 
the issues of the war. 

By direction of the War Department every 
student will receive instruction in these subjects in 
a special course, and I shall not attempt to deal 
in twenty minutes with a subject for which the 
War Department has set apart three hundred and 
fifty hours. 

My theme is Vergil's ''Arms and the Man," and 
the man, if we must give him a name, you may 
call Archimedes, for I want to speak of a man in 
relation to the tools of his trade, in this case the 
trade of war, and therefore, properly called arms. 

I suppose the chief difference between a mature 
man and a boy is that the mature man attaches 
greater importance to tools than the boy does. A 
woman, they say, needs only one tool — a hairpin. 

84 



Arms and Archimedes 

A boy of resolution and spirit feels he can do any- 
thing with no tool but himself. I notice the aver- 
age college boy scorns even to equip himself with 
a note book and a. pencil, believing in character- 
istic American fashion, that the less equipment 
he provides, the more chance he has to exercise 
his wits. I have even known college boys who put 
off, perhaps to the day before examination, the 
purchase of a text book, scorning ulterior aids in 
the pursuit of knowledge. I have noticed even in 
athletics that very few boys will equip themselves 
with the paraphernalia of athletics if left to them- 
selves. They would rather risk a broken nose 
than buy a nose gniard, rather risk a split hand 
than bother with a catcher's glove, run in shoes 
too large or too small, than take the trouble to 
be accurately fitted. 

Age on the contrary comes to love good tools. 
The barber has his pet razor, and takes infinite 
pains to keep it sharp ; the carpenter has his own 
special saw, or some extra tempered chisel, the 
dentist is as fond of some pet instrument of tor- 
ture as a mother of her first child. The chauffeur 
suffers personal agonies if his motor groans, the 
bank clerk has his pet pen, the draftsman prides 
himself on his pencil points, and even the hobo is 
likely to have some treasured stick which helps 
him carry his pack, ward off stray dogs, and 
steadies him when weary. 

The more civilized we become, the more depen- 
dent we grow on the various instrumentalities of 
our life. When we revert to some primeval state 

85 



Arms and Archimedes 

like warfare, therefore, we discover with surprise 
two things. We find first, that after all, it is the 
man behind the tool that counts, and second, and 
this we learn almost as soon, we find that that 
man counts for the most who can best fashion for 
himself tools adapted to his new job. 

The old man is likely to depend too much on 
tools, the young man is likely to attach too little 
importance to tools. Sometimes a young David 
with a simple tool like a sling, is more efficient than 
an old man with orthodox armor and sword, but 
generally speaking the principle holds, youth un- 
dervalues tools, age overvalues them. 

The War Department sets down as one of the 
chief aims of its military instruction, confidence in 
the power of the rifle. I don 't know just why they 
select the rifle, instead of the machine gun, or the 
gas bomb, or the hand grenade, but it is doubtless 
because it was the only tool of the old men who 
wrote the regulations, and like age in general, 
they had undue confidence in the tool they were 
most used to. 

Our task here at this college, as teachers, is to 
make youth feel the importance of, and have con- 
fidence in, a much wider range of equipment. 

We have had to teach this first to Washington, 
to convince the authorities that in this war, they 
are indeed fighting not an army, but the accumu- 
lated science of Germany's forty years. 

To teach that if as old men they rely on the tools 
of their youth, they are lost, or if as a young na- 

86 



Arms and Archimedes 

tion, they rely on their virile manhood alone, they 
are lost. 

Far fetched and intricate as it may appear, dubi- 
ous as some may think the experiment, Washing- 
ton has finally been convinced that colleges and 
universities are an essential industry even in war- 
time, and can give the nation arms, which they will 
not get elsewhere, and which are essential to the 
winning of the war. Some one told me recently 
that it had all been worked out scientifically just 
how many men a ton of steel spares the United 
States. We know that if the workmen strike and 
diminish the supply of steel, America must re- 
place the steel with the bodies of so many of the 
flower of her manhood. War is not only arms 
and the man. In these days it is arms or men, and 
it is our business to teach you young men the im- 
portance of adequate equipment not only for your 
own sakes, and for the sake of the work you have 
to do in the world, but also for the sake of the 
other men, who will have the necessary tools ac- 
cording as your administration and leadership as 
officers, are adequate or inadequate. If there are 
any among you who can see how a blacksmith 
forging a bayonet is getting ready to fight, how 
a soldier learning to operate or repair an auto- 
mobile is learning something that will help in the 
war, but who cannot see what the study of math- 
ematics, or Latin, or war aims, has to do with the 
struggle in Europe, he had better apply at once 
for a place in the vocational section, or in the can- 

87 



Arms and Archimedes 

tonment rather than in the college section of the 
S. A. T. C. 

If there is any one who thinks the things of the 
spirit are of no consequence compared with the 
things you can touch, and that can touch you, that 
the old adage that " he who ruleth his spirit is 
greater than he that taketh a city" applies only in 
peace times, he needs a little special tutoring in 
some algebraic equations. 

Arms plus man equals victory. Arms + man 
= victory. Arms minus man, or turn it around, 
minus man in parenthesis plus arms equals de- 
ficiency and defeat. Arms — man = deficiency 
and defeat. ( — man) -|- arms = deficiency and 
defeat. If we could only rid ourselves of the 
''minus man" we should save hundreds of thou- 
sands of lives. 

We hear a good deal of talk about the War De- 
partment having taken the colleges. Down in 
Washington you will hear a good deal of talk 
about the colleges having taken possession of the 
War Department. Neither is true. The watch- 
word of the hour is cooperation. We have dis- 
carded the minus sign for the period of the war. 
It is War Department plus colleges. It is men 
and arms. It is brains and ammunition and self- 
control. It is science and industry, capital plus 
labor, scholarship and morale that will win this 
war. 

We look to you young men to help make this 
combination soldier-student. The first rule of suc- 
cess is to be proud of your own particular job. 



Arms and Archimedes 

There is more truth than poetry in Pinafore's 
''He polished up the handle so carefully that now 
he is the ruler of the Queen 's Navy, ' ' so long as 
he had no choice but to polish the handle. Yet 
there never was a time in America when so many 
men were trying to do anything except the thing 
they were trainedi^o do, as now. If a man sticks 
at his regular job, no matter how essential, he feels 
rather a slacker. If he rushes off and gets the 
Government to put him at something else no mat- 
ter how poorly he does it, he feels a patriot. 

If you think that study is a bore and all the time 
you are at college, go about your tasks grudgingly, 
wishing you were at an officers' training camp, 
and enduring the S. A. T. C. only because it leads 
in that direction, you will lose half of what the col- 
lege has to give you. If on the other hand you 
realize that the chief equipment of the modern 
officer is not his sword, but certain mental quali- 
ties, that he fights with his mind, and his soul, more 
than with his arm, or his revolver, that knowledge, 
accurate observation, power of concentrated 
thought, are not qualities picked up over night, 
you will value more nearly at its true worth the 
contribution which the college has to make toward 
your equipment even in war time. 

Because analogies drawn from German science 
are properly odious at this time, I like to refer any 
old cynic or young skeptic who has doubts about 
the importance of colleges and of college trained 
men, in the winning of the war, to the old story 
of Archimedes. Archimedes probably means, to 

89 



Arms and Archimedes 

most of you, the old fool of a scholar who was 
so wrapped up in drawing geometrical figures in 
the sand, that he was slain by a soldier for fail- 
ing to answer a question. But that is by no means 
the whole story as it is given to us by Plutarch in 
his life of Marcellus. Marcellus by the way means 
martial, and he was one of the three men in Ro- 
man history entitled to offer spoils of war person- 
ally in his triumph to Jupiter Feretrius, because 
he, the commander-in-chief, had won them in per- 
sonal combat with the opposing commander. He 
may be taken theriefore, very well, in view of his 
name and his record, to stand for the martial 
spirit, for personal prowess in war in its elemental 
directness. 

Archimedes, on the other hand, was by pref- 
erence a scholar, a mathematician, a theorist. 
' * Give me, ' ' he said, * ' only another world as a ful- 
crum for my lever, and I will move this sphere," 
and though the theoretical scholar was the victor 
over the martial Marcellus, he asked that when 
he died, on his tomb should be placed a cylinder 
enclosing a sphere because he regarded the demon- 
stration of the mathematical relations of the con- 
taining solid to the contained, a greater triumph 
than those he won for his native city in war. 

The story as told by Plutarch relates how Syra- 
cuse was lucky in having a king, Hiero by name, 
who had sense enough to use his men of science to 
help him prepare for war, and when Archimedes 
had given him a practical demonstration of the 
power of the pulley he had at once said, ' * Use your 

90 



Arms and Archimedes 

scientific principles to make me offensive and de- 
fensive engines of war. ' ' So that when war in the 
person of Marcellus marches up against Syracuse 
and against science in the person of Archimedes, 
Archimedes is ready for him, and as the original 
Greek reads, "Archimedes' apparatus stood the 
Syracusans in good stead ; and with the apparatus 
its fabricator — and along with the contrivance the 
demiurge ' ' — another case of arms and the man. 

As we are interested in war news just now, per- 
haps, you will bear with me, while I read part 
of the account of that famous battle of the third 
century B. C. 

''When, therefore, the Eomans assaulted them 
by sea and land, the Syracusans were stricken 
dumb with terror ; they thought that nothing could 
withstand so furious an onset by such forces. 
But Archimedes began to ply his engines, and 
shot against the land forces of the assailants all 
sorts of missiles and immense masses of stones, 
which came down with incredible din and speed; 
nothing whatever could ward off their weight, but 
they knocked down in heaps those who stood in 
their way, and thr-ew their ranks into confusion. 
At the same time huge beams were suddenly pro- 
jected over the ships from the walls, which sank 
some of them with great weights plunging down 
from on high, others were seized at the prow by 
iron claws, or beaks like the beaks of cranes, 
drawn straight up into the air, and then plunged 
stem foremost into the depths, or were turned 
round and round by means of enginery within the 

91 



Arms and Archimedes 

city, and dashed upon the steep cliffs that jutted 
out beneath the wall of the city, with great destruc- 
tion of the fighting men on board, who perished in 
the wrecks. Frequently, too, a ship would be 
lifted out of the water into mid-air, whirled hither 
and thither as it hung there, a dreadful spectacle, 
until its crew had been thrown out and hurled 
in all direction, when it would fall empty upon the 
walls, or slip away from the clutch that had held 
it. 

*' However, Marcellus made his escape, and jest- 
ing with his own artificers and engineers, 'Let us 
stop,' said he, 'fighting against this geometrical 
Briareus, who uses our ships like cups to ladle 
water from the sea, and has whipped and driven 
off in disgrace our sambuca, and with the many 
missiles which he shoots against us all at once, 
outdoes the hundred-handed monsters of mythol- 
ogy.' For in reality all the rest of the Syracu- 
sans were hut a body for the designs of Archi- 
medes, and his the one soul moving and manag- 
ing everything, for all other weapons lay idle, and 
his alone were then employed hy the city both in 
offense and defense. At last the Eomans became 
so fearful that, whenever they saw a bit of rope or 
a stick of timber projecting a little over the wall, 
'There it is,' they cried, 'Archimedes is train- 
ing some engine upon us,' and turned their backs 
and fled. Seeing this, Marcellus desisted from all 
fighting and assault, and thenceforth depended on 
a long siege." 

I covet for the Student Army Training Corps 

92 



Arms and Archimedes 

the part of Archimedes in this war. I trust the 
time will come when the Germans, whenever they 
see a bit of rope, or a stick of timber projecting 
a little above the trenches, will say "There it is, 
it is those American college men again at some 
scheme with brains behind it. " I hope still more, 
that some American Archimedes will yet be dis- 
covered whose inventions will end the war in an 
overwhelming victory for the alHes, but such an 
application of science to warfare is not likely 
unless our King Hiero calls on Science to serve, 
and gives it a chance to work undisturbed in its 
laboratories. 

I wish I could stop here, leaving science prop- 
erly triumphant, but if I did so, you would nat- 
urally ask, why should it have happened that 
Archimedes, so lofty a spirit, so profound a soul, 
so wise and so inventive, should have been re- 
membered chiefly by reason of the stupidity and 
futility of his death? 

In the answer to that question there is perhaps 
another parable to be drawn from the war of 
twenty centuries ago for our war of to-day. 
After some years of siege, Marcellus noticed, says 
Plutarch, a certain tower that was carelessly 
guarded and ' ' seized an oportunity when the Syra- 
cusans were celebrating a festival and were given 
over to wine and sport. ' ' 

Science, be it ever so wise, arms, be they ever 
so clever, are of no avail without steadfastness 
and fidelity behind them. 

We come back then to the theme with which 

93 



Arms and Archimedes 

we began, and the word which I would leave with 
you as a motto for this momentous year is "Arms 
and the Man/' Not the man alone, brave and 
courageous as he may be, without the requisite 
material and mental equipment, not the arms 
alone, automatic and irresistible as they may be 
guaranteed to be, but the man with his arms, along 
with the contrivance — the demiurge. 



94 



WAR AND EDUCATION 

FOR the eighty-sixth time professors and 
students gather at Lafayette to begin a new- 
year's work, to live together in one of the most 
felicitous of human relationships, the relation-, 
ship of master and disciple, to enjoy the common 
life of scholars, to satisfy the insistent inquiries 
of the spirit as to ourselves and the universe, to 
serve our beloved country by efficient prepara- 
tion in knowledge and technical skill. 

We are in large part strangers to each other to- 
day. 

The community of teachers changes less rap- 
idly than the community of scholars, and yet if 
forty per cent, of the students here to-day are 
strangers to their fellow students, so too forty 
per cent, of the faculty have entered since my 
own very recent entrance two and a half years 
ago. We are none of us so old or so long estab- 
lished then, that we cannot put ourselves in the 
place of the new man, share his enthusiasm and 
fresh point of view, and yield him ungrudgingly 
a place in the sun within the wdde walls of fair 
Lafayette. Our first word then is a word of 
hearty welcome to the newcomers, both in faculty 
and in student body. The freshmen constitute 
a larger part of the college than in normal times. 

Address at the opening of Lafayette College, September, 1917. 

95 



War and Education 

We owe them much for having the courage and 
resolution to settle down to routine study in these 
stirring days. We trust that they will not feel 
that the importance of the place they occupy 
numerically in the college, can be apportioned to 
them individually, making each of them a more 
important man than in ordinary times, but that 
the good old traditions of the lowly estate of the 
freshman will survive even the perils of war 
time. 

Our second word is a word of grateful memory 
of those who would be with us to-day, except for 
the country's necessities. Twenty-eight of the 
senior class, 28 of the junior class, 46 of the 
sophon;iore class are known to be in the national 
service. They are a part of that larger Lafayette 
whose walls stretch round the world, and are one 
with us to-day in the spirit of service to country 
and to mankind, which has marked Lafayette men 
through all the years. We remember them with 
grateful affection, and wish for them a safe re- 
turn to the ''College on the Hill." 

We have welcomed new classes to this hill be- 
fore, but never under such conditions as to-day. 
Doubtless you are wondering, as I wonder, how the 
war will affect our college course, what difference 
there is between the freshman this year and last 
year, what ought to be the difference in the col- 
lege and in college men, in war time as compared 
with peace time. Does the price and value of 
learning rise in war time like the price of wheat 
and coal? If silver and copper double in value, 

96 



War and Education 

how about wisdom? What are its market quota- 
tions? If rubles and dollars are at a discount, 
what about science! Athletics were at a pre- 
mium for college men in peace, how shall we rate 
them then in war time? If the time spent in 
study before the war yielded eventually higher re- 
turns than the same time spent in industry, how 
is it now that the price of manual labor has risen 
fifty per cent., and you can get from fifty cents 
to a dollar an hour making munitions? Congress 
in its draft bill has decided that men in certain 
industries are as important to the country as men 
in armies, but that study is not an industry, and 
if you are 21 your services are more valuable to 
the country in this crisis as a soldier than as a 
scholar, unless you are studying to be a doctor 
or a clergyman. Is this a fair rating of the value 
of technical education to the country, even in this 
time of war? The United States is offering to 
pay two hundred civil engineers eighteen hun- 
dred dollars a year a piece to go to France, 
while at the same time it is curtailing the supply 
of civil engineer apprentices available in normal 
times at nine hundred dollars a year. At one time 
during the summer Washington announced the 
exemption of technical students, but the proposed 
exemption was withdrawn on the technicality 
that a man engaged in study was not engaged in 
industry, the term industrious student apparently 
having become obsolete. 

What would the Government give to-day for the 
discovery of a more certain fuel than gasoline for 

97 



War and Education 

airships, for the discovery of a more efficient gas 
that would destroy life in acres at once, for a 
cheap method of producing potash, or a fertilizer 
that would double the yield of wheat to the acre I 
What would they pay if the civil engineers in 
charge of the Siberian Railroad could by the ex- 
penditure of money be made at once as efficient as 
the engineers of the Pennsylvania Railroad? 
What would it be worth to America if applied 
science had advanced ten years more rapidly, and 
we were to-day burning our coal at the mines and 
transporting the energy for heat and fuel, instead 
of blocking our railroads with the dead weight of 
ashes? As in Solomon's day, so in this en- 
lightened twentieth century, "Wisdom crieth 
aloud in the streets, her price is above rubies," 
even though she has no rating with an exemption 
board. Do not forget these things when you ask 
yourselves, am I worth more to my country as a 
soldier or as a civil, as an electrical, as a mechan- 
ical engineer? 

In the minds of the faculty, as we greet the 
new men, are doubtless other questions. What is 
this material placed in our hands to-day? We 
had grown used to thinking of threescore and ten 
as a normal life, long enough for a rich and varied 
experience, long enough for the slow unfolding 
of a soul, long enough for men to see their chil- 
dren and their grandchildren rise and carry on 
the torch of learning. Death we knew was ever 
a possibility, but remote enough in the great ma- 
jority of cases to be left out of the reckoning. 

98 



War and Education 

Disease, physical maiming, the loss of limbs and 
disfigurement, were coming to be negligible fac- 
tors in the life of the educated man. The ideals of 
our life were coming to be ideals of physical com- 
fort, steam heated apartment, paved street ideals. 
We wanted our wool coats thinner, our dresses 
and shoes flimsier, our faces smoother than did 
other generations. We had begun to suspect that 
the fruits of liberal culture, and the enlargement 
of the soul, counted for little in the sleek life of 
modern civilization, and to question whether there 
was any life of the spirit apart from the life of 
the body. Now war has taken us in its grip, and 
the normal life of the youth of 21 is to be that of 
a soldier. The men we expected to graduate last 
June for life, we have graduated for war. Their 
expectancy of life in the life insurance tables is 
only a quarter of what we had come to expect. 
The life of the family, the life of the home, is to 
be left out of the reckoning. How then, we ask 
ourselves as a faculty, how then does the material 
placed in our hands to-day differ from that of last 
year, and what change is required in the process 
of molding or tempering to meet the changed 
conditions! If we teach these men, as we have 
taught them, shall we not be tempering too fine 
material, which later the drill master must take 
and harden and coarsen for the cruder handicraft 
of war? 

Is learning of any use to the soldier, is a think- 
ing machine of any use, ought he to be liberally 
educated, or ought we to do our best to make him 

99 



War and Education 

into a mechanical machine, no more sentient, no 
more complicated than a printing press? 

War is not a new thing in the world however 
new it seems to us. America which in peace will 
hear nothing of war, or preparation for war, with 
the unstable equilibrium of a democracy is in 
danger in war time of being willing to listen to 
nothing but war, yet those who read history know 
that through long centuries the arts of peace and 
the arts of war traveled side by side. Sometimes 
in the same man, sometimes in specialists. 
Socrates was both a teacher and a soldier, but 
more often the scholar has been the antithesis of 
the soldier. The troubadour rarely shared the ex- 
ploits he celebrated. We do not know much about 
Homer, but we never confound the picture of him 
in our minds with the picture of Achilles or Hec- 
tor. Caesar and Cicero are alike in both being re- 
quired for college admission, in both beginning 
with "C," in both living at the same time. We 
think of Caesar, the warrior, as a scholar because 
of his Commentaries, but we never think of Cicero, 
the scholar and statesman, as a warrior, though he 
was a soldier at the age of seventeen. 

We urge as a mitigation of the aims of war, 
that it produces letters, that it advances science, 
that the lost art of letter writing, for example, is 
being revived by Americans in France, like Vic- 
tor Chapman. We urge that the coming of the 
aeroplane as a commercial conveyance has been 
hastened twenty years by the war, but the con- 
verse is not true. We do not praise literature, 

100 



War and Education 

we do not praise science, on the ground that they 
produce war. Which then ranks higher in the 
universal scale of values? Behind me you see a 
memorial window to Ario Pardee, and to Presi- 
dent Cattell, of whom the inscription states ''one 
gave, the other built, Pardee Hall." The two 
figures represent Charlemagne and Alcuin side by 
side. Charlemagne is the larger and stronger 
figure — Alcuin the slighter, more spiritual figure, 
and yet you feel that Charlemagne leans upon 
Alcuin. Charlemagne was the warrior who added 
nation after nation to his dominion, and gave them 
the blessings of firm and secure government. 
Charlemagne was the warrior who on one day 
caused 4,500 Saxons to be decapitated at Ver- 
den on the AUer, having seven years before re- 
solved never to sheathe the sword until the 
Saxons were either subdued and converted to 
Christ, or annihilated, and yet in spite of this and 
other deeds of warlike prowess, the biographer of 
Charlemagne records — "He was ever learning, 
and fond of learning, no subject ever came amiss 
to him. The most attractive feature of his char- 
acter was his love of learning. He delighted in 
the society of scholars, and in his life time men 
called him Charles the "Wise, not Charles the 
Great." 

We are in danger in America, where war is so 
new, of thinking that the gun is the only weapon, 
and that as loyal citizens we have but one thing 
to do, and that is to equip and maintain our fight- 
ing forces as efficiently as possible, and leave the 

101 



War and Education 

outcome of the war to the God who fights with the 
heaviest battalions. This might well be the na- 
tional attitude of Germany, because the ideals of 
morality and reason do not fight for the German 
cause in this war, but America will only deny her- 
self her advantage in the field of morality and 
reason if she fails to encourage liberal education 
or declines to permit free discussion and to use 
a well informed and rationally persuaded pub- 
lic opinion as her most potent and decisive im- 
plement of contest. 

Lafayette, for whom this college was named, 
was remarkable for many qualities of life and 
temperament. In nothing was he more remark- 
able than in the fact that a soldier by profession, 
neither in our Revolution, nor after its victorious 
conclusion, did he come to think of war as an end 
in itself, or other than as an imperfect instru- 
ment for the achievement of those ideals of free- 
dom and liberty which he held with the same 
simple faith and fervor in old age as in youth, in 
the presence of King Louis, as in the presence of 
George Washington, in the distressing times of the 
French Revolution, and in the presence of Na- 
poleon, as the prisoner of the King of Prussia, 
or in an Austrian dungeon. As he said in a let- 
ter at the tim,e of the French Revolution — ''At 
nineteen, I devoted myself to the liberty of man- 
kind and the destruction of despotism, as much 
as a powerless individual like myself could do so. 
I departed for the New World, opposed by all, and 
aided by none. I only attached value to some 

102 



War and Education 

military talents as the means of attaining my 
aim," and, as he says elsewhere, ''he was as ready 
to aid a fight for freedom in Ireland or in Hol- 
land, as in America or France." 

He fulfilled, too, in unusual degree, that maxim 
of Cicero — ''War should be so managed, as to 
remember that the only end of it is peace." The 
unique thing about the present war is not only 
that it is a world war, but that in a greater degree 
than ever before, it is a war which has a ten- 
dency to absorb the entire energies of the na- 
tions engaged. The men in the trenches, the men 
who go over the top, the men who go under the 
sea, and in the air above — all the fighting forces 
play a relatively smaller part in the war in pro- 
portion to the total amount of human energy in- 
volved than ever before. This is due partly to 
the fact that the war is on such a gigantic scale, 
and partly to the fact that it is a war of Applied 
Science, and involves the products of complicated 
industries to a greater extent than ever before. 
It is, also, partly due to the improved means of 
communication, to the universal reading of news- 
papers, and the consequent dissemination of mili- 
tary news among all the people. Another rea- 
son perhaps is that democracies like to. do only 
one thing at a time. Everybody's doing it, Every- 
body join! Shout for one thing to-day, and for- 
get it to-morrow. So that the enthusiasms of 
Wednesday shall never be revived on Friday, but 
be as dead on Friday as a moving picture reel 
shown on Wednesday. This is one of the char- 

103 



War and Education 

acteristics of democracies, which has its good and 
bad points. Perhaps we ought not to take excep- 
tion to it more than to that philosophy of life 
reflected in the old children's song, 

This is the day we wash our clothes, wash our clothes, 

So early Monday morning. 
This is the day we dry our clothes. 

So early Tuesday morning, etc. 

Then the test of democracy will be whether it can 
sustain the same interest with Wednesday as Red 
Cross Day, and Thursday as Liberty Loan Day, 
and Friday as Wheat Day and Saturday as Coal 
Day, as the weeks roll around, ^s the whole race 
has sustained with Monday as wash day, and 
Tuesday as ironing day through the generations. 
In view of this absorbing character of the war, 
and in view of the fact that the Government, in 
the face of growing military necessity, has re- 
ceded from its plan of making provision for a 
continued supply of technical men, the technical 
schools of the country have felt that they must 
do their part to avert the threatened calamity, 
and have united and spent thousands of dollars in 
trying to impress upon the country the necessity 
of maintaining the supply of educated men. No 
one institution could have done this without lay- 
ing itself open to the charge of seeking its own 
selfish interest, but when 36 of the leading tech- 
nical schools of the country are willing to throw 
aside all questions of institutional rivalry or in- 
stitutional preeminence, and to join, the great 

104 



War and Education 

and the small, alphabetically, in an appeal to the 
country, the country must believe that the doc- 
trine so promulgated is based on sound founda- 
tions. You who are fortunate enough to be able 
to serve your country by study must not be mis- 
led by our natural interest in things military 
at this time, nor feel that as students you are in 
a side eddy, and out of the line of march of the 
nation's progress, serving your own interest while 
your friends and class mates serve the cause of 
freedom and democracy. 

To you who are not technical students, but stu- 
dents looking forward to the ministry, or to teach- 
ing, or to literary pursuits, or to finance, I would 
say a similar word. We need religion in war 
time, as never before, to make our thinking in- 
telligent. ''Without God," as Mr. Britling says, 
''we begin with no beginning, we think to no 
end" in war time. Society must have some ex- 
planation for the curtailment which it demands of 
the individual life for the benefit of the race. 
Without God and immortality, and the ideals of 
sacrifice which religion has instilled, society has 
no rational answer to the young man who asks 
"What is the recompense of the reward to him as 
an individual," if he lays down his life for his 
country at 21, and elects six months or a year of 
deadly monotony and drudgery, and a week or 
two of glorious fighting, in preference to the nor- 
mal life of sixty or seventy years of his neigh- 
bor. You, who are studying, therefore, for the 
ministry have much greater responsibilities, and 

105 



War and Education 

move in a much needier world than in ordinary 
times. When men are being slaughtered by mil- 
lions and are counted but cannon fodder, men will 
renew their interest if you can tell them of a God 
without whose notice ''not a sparrow falls to the 
ground" and who "counts the very hairs of their 
heads." 

To you who are to be teachers and writers, I 
would say that the greatest task of the war will 
be to keep alive the ideals of liberty and democ- 
racy, in whose name we have entered the conflict. 
Lord Northcliffe admires America because there 
is ''no complicated reckoning of compensation" 
when the nation shuts a man's saloon in war time, 
"no sentimental slush about the rights of neutral 
countries like Spain, and Sweden." But the dan- 
ger is lest, as in Germany, there will be no sense of 
justice, of toleration, of fair dealing, but only the 
law of military necessity. Some of those who 
would direct American thought seem to feel that 
you cannot fight a man and love him at the same 
time — that no one can be a loyal American who 
regards an enemy as a fellow man, and yet this 
is the philosophy which seems the true one, un- 
less we are ready to adopt Germany's philosophy 
of the superstate, answerable to no one but itself. 
The world is in this war to-day because of Ger- 
many's false philosophy, that a state is above the 
laws of morality, that it has no duties to its fellow 
states, because it learned only half of the Apostle's 
injunction, "Owe no man anything," and insisted 
that a sovereign state must be free of obligations, 

106 



War and Education 

and shut its eyes to the second half of the injunc- 
tion, which applies to states just as much as to 
individuals, ' ' but to love one another. ' ' 

The creed of democracy is the creed of Chris- 
tianity — that whatsoever is right for any one is 
right for every one. The creed of the superstate 
leads irresistibly to universal war, when super- 
state comes in conflict with superstate, and can 
only result, if successful, in world dominion, a 
dream which has proved a will-o'-the-wisp in the 
days of Alexander, Augustus and Charlemagne to 
draw empire after empire into a hopeless morass. 

America has not done enough constructive think- 
ing the last three years. In the first part of the 
war it was urged not to think too much lest it lose 
its neutral mind, and now it is urged not to think 
too much lest it lose its martial will. The country 
has been plunged so suddenly into a line of action 
contrary to all the doctrines in which it has been 
brought up that it is not strange that the public 
mind is bewildered, and because it gives signs 
of groping toward an intelligent comprehension of 
the war, is accused of moral and intellectual in- 
dolence, and advised that the best way to avoid a 
fool's cap in the school of events is to keep still 
or play the part of a parrot. Be loyal to the truth 
as you see it, and independent in your thinking. 
Eemember Lafayette 's doctrine of natural rights, 
so inherent in every man's existence that all so- 
ciety united has not the right of depriving him 
of them — among them liberty of opinion, the care 
of his own honor, and life, the conmiunication of 

107 



War and Education 

thought in every possible manner. President Wil- 
son in his reply to the Pope speaks of this war as 
the final winning of American independence. The 
war may free America from the possibility of for- 
eign invasion, and from interference with its com- 
merce on the seas, but there is a battle for freedom 
begun long before the American Eevolution, and 
which will continue long after this war, of which 
we are reminded by the motto on our college seal, 
the words of the great teacher — "Ye shall know 
the truth, and the truth shall make you free." 
You, who are to be students of history, students of 
government, students of economics, who are to 
learn to know men through their literatures, must 
not rate too low the importance of the work you 
have to do for your country. You must remind us 
that he is still a slave, whose limbs alone are free. 
With increasing conscription of the body we shall 
look to you for increasing liberation of the spirit. 
We shall look to you to win for us the freedom 
which truth gives, and to remind us if need be in 
the words of that hymn which college men sing 
with fervor : 

Our fathers chained in prisons dark, 
Were still in heart and conscience free. 

If you are tempted to find your college course 
monotonous before the end of the term, think of 
the awful monotony which the great bulk of the 
fighting forces is enduring in France. Talk with 
your fellows who are in the Naval Peserve, and 
find out how long and empty their days are ; think of 

108 



War and Education 

the thousands of sailors on battleships waiting 
quietly at sea like a cat watching a mousehole; 
look at the guardsmen down on the railroad 
bridges, and you mil find that the routine of col- 
lege life is relatively exciting compared with much 
of the life of the soldier. 

If you are tempted to rearrange your scale of 
moral values, steady yourself by resorting to liter- 
ature which sets down the opinion of nations to 
whom war was a commonplace. If war tempts 
you to place a lower value on yourself as a physi- 
cal animal destined for early slaughter, stop be- 
fore you rate yourself in terms of the physical, and 
think how the reality of the spiritual side of man 
has come to be recognized in the war, and how 
whole nations have had a spiritual rebirth, and 
then if you mind the things of the spirit you will 
not fulfill the deeds of the flesh. War makes men 
either hogs or heroes, swine or spirits of lofty en- 
deavor. Both sides of human character are mag- 
nified in war. If you give the spiritual side of 
your nature room for expansion, it will take care 
of the domination of the lower side. Our life as 
a college in war time, and our life as individuals 
is as different from our normal life as war bread 
is different from white bread. They tell us there 
Is more of vitamen, more of the principle of life in 
war bread than in white bread, and that refine- 
ments of civilization as we know them in peace, 
are at the expense of the virile elements which are 
present in war. Shadows, dark places, sorrows, 
pains and sufferings which make the bread of war 

109 



War and Education 

dark and bitter to the taste, are, we are told, for 
our spiritual nourishment. Nevertheless, given 
the opportunity, the nations of the world after 
the war will doubtless go back by preference to 
the white bread of civilization. But so long as we 
must for the present eat the black bread of war, 
let us give it such mental mastication that we shall 
gain for ourselves all the nourishment of soul it 
has to give. Let us be resolute in our purposes. 
Let us know that we know now in part, but know 
what we know. Let us adopt Franklin's advice, 
''Have you somewhat to do to-morrow, do it to- 
day," and comfort ourselves with Butler's opti- 
mism, 

**For discords make the sweetest airs, 
And curses are a kind of prayers, ' ' 

and if possible let us contribute our share of con- 
structive patriotism to the solution of the war's 
problems. 

In the Eevolution there was a ballad by Howard 
Warren very popular with the Americans which 
ran, 

"That seat of Science, Athens, 
And earth's proud mistress, Rome, 

Where now are all their glories? 
We scarce can find a tomb. 

"Then guard your rights, Americans, 

Nor stoop to lawless sway. 
Oppose! Oppose! Oppose! Oppose! 

For North America." 

110 



War and Education 

Let us oppose for North America, where we 
must, but let our opposition be against the enemies 
abroad, and against the enemies of the Republic 
within, who would neglect the foundations of jus- 
tice, freedom and mutual respect. 

Let us not go so far in our battle for world free- 
dom, as the orator of the French Revolution was 
ready to go, who according to Taine said — "I 
would take my own head by the hair, cut it off, and 
presenting it to the despot, would say to him, 
Tyrant, behold the head of a free man." But let 
us join with Lafayette and ''heartily address our 
prayers to Heaven, that by her known wisdom, 
patriotism, and liberality of principles, as well as 
firmness of conduct, America may preserve the 
consequence she has so well acquired, and con- 
tinue to command the admiration of the world. ' ^ 



111 



EDUCATION FOR THE NEW ERA 

WE welcome you to a New Year, and to a new 
era. To the old Lafayette and yet to a 
Lafayette which can never be the same college that 
it was before the war. Colleges change with the 
changes in the hearts of their men. We take it for 
granted that the material part of the college, build- 
ings, the brick and stone, this window behind me, 
that these, at least, are the same to-day as yester- 
day, and that they look alike to Freshman and to 
Senior. But a larger experience convinces us 
that this is not the case. What we see depends, in 
fact, on what we are. The college trustee who is 
an alumnus, can never see the college buildings 
exactly as the new trustee from outside who looks 
at them through no boyhood memories, and whose 
mental pictures are tinged with no youthful asso- 
ciations. Wordsworth Avas but voicing the uni- 
versal experience of the race when he wrote on re- 
visiting Yarrow, ''I see — but not by sight alone, 
loved Yarrow, have I won thee?"' 

But if past associations determine what we see, 
if the Lafayette we see to-day is determined in 
large measure by our way of looking at her in the 
past, still more, is the Lafayette of to-day a differ- 
ent vision to each one of us according to each 
man's plans, purposes and aspirations for the fu^ 

Adfireps at the opening of Lafayette College, January, 1919. 

1121 



Education for the New Era 

ture. There is a curious selective law of assimila- 
tion running through all nature. Out of the same 
universe the plant and the animal according to the 
law of their being seize, feel, taste, digest and con- 
vert to their own purposes material for their dif- 
fering lives. This law holds not only for plant 
and animal but also for mind and spirit. We see 
that for which we are looking. We make our own 
in an intellectual and spiritual way that which fits 
into our plans and ambitions. The broader and 
more far-reaching our interests, the greater our 
experience, the more sights and sounds enter our 
consciousness and become a part of our life. If 
the senses and sensual appetites have the upper 
hand in a man 's life he will meet from hour to hour 
and from day to day experiences which will feed 
and nourish and develop these appetites. His 
roommate on the other hand may live largely the 
same life, walk the same paths and outwardly at 
least experience the same events, yet because his 
affections are set upon higher things his purposes 
and ambitions directed elsewhere, the roommate 
will by the universal selective process of assimila- 
tion, experience a totally different life and absorb 
and make his own totally different elements. You 
w^ill discover in the laboratory of biology or in the 
laboratory of chemistry no more infallible law, of 
assimilation or of chemical affinity, than the law of 
spiritual assimilation expressed by John Bur- 
roughs in his lines, 

"The waters know their own and draw 
The brook that springs in yonder heights; 
113 



Education for the New Era 

So flows the good with equal law 
Unto the soul of pure delights." 

We had forgotten before the war what a large 
part the will and desire played in determining our 
world. We had begun to think of a thirst for 
pleasure, a selfish sparing of ourselves effort or 
pain, as natural inevitable parts of ourselves, 
which by an inevitable law must seek their satis- 
faction. And then with the war there came in 
the mightier passions and these dominant passions 
showed their power in that out of the most repul- 
sive material of experience, mud, filth, blood, ver- 
min, disease, and pain they could assimilate a 
life of the spirit far more beautiful, more real, 
more satisfying, more pleasurable even in the best 
sense, than the sensuously pleasant life which the 
bod^ had tried to build for itself in peace. I trust 
that we shall not forget too soon the lesson the war 
has taught that a man's purposes, ideals and ambi- 
tions are not the product of his material environ- 
ment, but that there is within him a spiritual 
power and will which can hear and respond to the 
call of other spirits and of great ideals. 

I feel reasonably sure then in saying that I wel- 
come you to a new Lafayette and to a new era, not 
so much because Lafayette is changed as because 
you are changed. 

Some of my cynical friends nevertheless say 
this talk of a new era is overdone. We don't 
think college life will be very different, we don't 
think national life will be very different after the 

114 



Education for the New Era 

war from what it was before the war. The men 
we meet are the same men to-day that they were 
four years ago. 

Now, of course, if this be true, that the men of 
to-day are the same as the men of four years ago, 
then I am wrong in supposing that you return to 
a new Lafayette or stand on the threshold of a 
new era. At least I am wrong, if men everywhere 
8.re the same, because the new era, and our life 
here at Lafayette while largely dependent on our 
own plans and ambitions, is also determined by 
the impact of the plans and ambitions of other men 
upon our lives. 

I base my belief in a new era and a new Lafay- 
ette, not only on what I know of the changes in 
you but of the changes which I know have occurred 
in other men. America with her President travel- 
ing and conferring in other lands can never be the 
America she was with her President tied to Wash- 
ington. Two hundred million Teutons without a 
Kaiser introduce a totally new force into the world 
— a totally new factor which must in the long run 
affect our experience. Hungry millions in Russia, 
seething millions awaking to new life in China, 
Japan and India change the conditions of the prob- 
lem which you have to solve for yourself here in 
Lafayette College, and whether you are a new man 
yourself or not, the world in which you must live 
is changed, so that you cannot be the same or lead 
the same life in all ways, if you would. 

How happy we should all be if we could meet 
here on the threshold of this new year a divinely 

115 



Education for the New Era 

inspired guide who would foretell all things which 
are to conxe to pass in the next ten years, and give 
us a chart and a compass by which we might steer. 
There are perplexities enough in shaping one's 
course through a well charted ocean, but the first 
ships which seek to navigate after a volcanic erup- 
tion must feel their way, sounding carefully from 
time to time with the lead of experience. Of 
course the stars remain michanged. The great 
fixed immutable principles of right and wrong, of 
love to God and to fellow man, are the same to-day 
as before the war, but our Scylla and our 
Charybdis are shifted and the stars will not help 
us to discover or to avoid them. With what equip- 
ment then shall we set sail? First, I would say 
with the name and location of our port clearly 
fixed in mind. The big things, the things that 
really matter, have been brought so much closer to 
us by the war, have been so much more in our 
thoughts than usual, that it ought to be easier for 
us to determine just what we conceive the purpose 
of life to be than in ordinary times. We want to 
be perfectly frank with ourselves, when we think 
about "those who sleep in Flanders fields," or 
who return crippled and maimed. We cannot 
have two measuring rules for life, one for them 
and one for us. If their lives were a success, 
if we rate them high by the measuring rod we use, 
then we must not use for our own lives a measur- 
ing rod which applied to theirs would show deficit 
and loss. Out of the turmoil of this war I expect 
to see American college men emerge with a more 

116 



Education for the New Era 

well considered philosophy of life than has been 
theirs in the past. This will make American col- 
lege life more mature and will be the first item 
of equipment for the new voyage. 

Second, if your destination is firmly fixed in 
mind, the next requisite for the new voyage is an 
open mind. It is characteristic of a new era that 
we cannot use our fathers ' charts or go by the old 
formulae. If you know as much as your fellow of 
equal age, if your heart is as pure and as stout as 
his, you are as qualified to shape the course as he. 
But you must sail in the experimental spirit, ready 
to be guided by the experience of the day, and to 
alter and realter your course as the land and cur- 
rents and winds and tides may suggest. 

And, third, I would mention courage and faith, 
always preeminent virtues in youth but never 
more so than when setting forth to a land you 
know not. 

And last, but not least, knowledge — knowledge 
of two kinds, first a knowledge of men and of the 
experiences of other men sailing in every direction, 
and under all conditions, an experience which has 
been treasured up in language and literature, in 
philosophy and history, in art and music, in 
science, tools and machines, and secondly the 
knowledge of methods and devices for reading and 
interpreting for yourselves new experiences and 
drawing proper conclusions therefrom, and of the 
technique for utilizing material of all kinds for 
such machines, tools or structures as you may re- 
quire to successfully complete the voyage. If con- 

117 



Education for the New Era 

ditions of life do not change, tools need not change 
very much. Life by rote is not a very difficult 
matter. But if 3^ou are going to be an adventurer 
and leader in the new era you will feel the need of 
knowing all that is known, for after all, it is but 
very little that we do know, or if you are not to be 
a leader but hope to be taken along on the expedi- 
tion, your chances of going in the leaders ' boat will 
be multiplied a thousand times if there is some 
one thing you can do as well or better than any one 
else. Wars undoubtedly created kings, called 
forth into prominence the competent man, the man 
who could do what had to be done, and while the 
present war has been no king-making war in the 
old sense, yet like all previous wars it has served 
to reveal men of ability and to place them in posi- 
tions of responsibility and power. It has done 
more than that. It has taught democracy in a 
way that the lesson has never been taught before, 
how democracy above every form of government is 
dependent for its success or failure, for its effi- 
ciency; for getting done the thing it wants done; 
upon the caliber of men it can find for its service. 
And democracy proposes to see to it, that if our 
present system of education will not supply ade- 
quate men for the nation's tasks, the system shall 
be strengthened and improved for that purpose, 
and in this great task we of Lafayette must do 
our share. The new Lafayette will, I trust, ac- 
cordingly, lay greater emphasis on keeping fit 
physically, on the splendid human animal, which 
can stand erect and serve the mind instantly with- 

118 



Education for the New Era 

out fatigue; on a spirit of service to the nation, a 
larger patriotism which will perform the full serv- 
ice of the private in the ranks in peace as well as 
war, so that our whole civil life shall be well 
ordered — on a broader brotherhood, which will 
apply the ideals of fellowship and mutual helpful- 
ness for which our fraternities and colleges stand 
to the larger units of national, and international 
life, calling nothing common or unclean which God 
has cleansed. As a discriminating French writer 
has recently observed — "the part of America in 
the war appears great, but that which she is called 
to play in the peace of to-morrow is unprece- 
dented. ' ' 

And for that part she and you are peculiarly 
fitted. '^To the American," says the Frenchman, 
''his fatherland is not behind him in a venerated 
past, it is before him, in a future that he foresees 
and is helping to bring into being. 'Go Ahead!' 
The old device is truer here than anywhere else. 
The American is moving toward his fatherland 
(his patrie) and creating it by the very movement 
in which he seeks for it. He is conscious that she 
is his work, that she comes forth from him rather 
than he from her. His country is more than any- 
thing else, a will to be, a part of his own will, a 
hope rather than a reality and a hope to be real- 
ized. He will realize it. That is his true reason 
for being." You too, we trust, will realize the 
new Lafayette, and so your better selves. That, 
indeed, is your true reason for being here. And 
for that we wish you all. Godspeed. 

119 



THE COLLEGE AND THE SHADOW 
OF WAR 

OVER in Pennsylvania our careful Board of 
Censors of Motion Pictures have very exact 
ideas of propriety. I am told, for example, that 
a kiss may be fifteen feet of film long, but that a 
kiss more than fifteen feet long is outlawed. It 
is dehghtful to have such very accurate and ex- 
act standards by which to distinguish wrong from 
right, and no doubt it occurs to you that toast- 
masters might very well organize a censorship 
along the same efficient lines. It is always a 
puzzle, however, to a college president to know 
just how to tell the alumni the year's story in 
fifteen minutes, and at the same time avoid every- 
thing of vital moment, lest he be suspected of 
bringing the shop to the banqueting hall. 

Lafayette himself solved the problem of a speech 
to New Yorkers by not visiting New York during 
the Revolution. Neither on his first or second 
visits to America, but only on his third visit when 
he was no longer in service did he venture into 
New York, and then he paid the consequences by 
having to make a speech. With your president, 
however, the beginning of the third year of service 
means the third visit to the New York alumni, 
and therefore the third speech. What I could tell 



Address to the New York Alumni of Lafayette College, New 
York City, February, 1917. 

120 



The College and the Shadow of War 

you of the college, that it is larger than ever, 
richer than ever, more wholesome in its life, more 
desperatel}^ in need of money to help its faculty 
meet the 30% increase in the cost of living, would 
be overshadowed, I fear, by the larger questions, 
now engaging your minds and the flashes of im- 
pending storm on the muttering horizon. 

As I walked down Fifth Avenue to-day and 
saw more Stars and Stripes than ever decorated 
the city on the most festal days, I felt and you 
feel that there is only one subject uppermost in 
our minds as American citizens, and that is loy- 
alty. And in loyalty, Lafayette is not behind her 
brothers. True to their name, true to the immor- 
tal example of the great marquis, the men of 
Lafayette of this generation as of former genera- 
tions have already given expression of their loy- 
alty, their readiness to serve their country and 
the cause of freedom. 

Shall we talk then of campaigning and discard 
education except military education for the time? 
What will be the effect of war on our colleges if 
war comes? I am asked. Shall we lose, for the 
time, interest in education, because of our interest 
in war? Will loyalty to country sap loyalty to 
Lafayette? The answer is hard to find in ad- 
vance. One thing we know with great assurance, 
if we may depend at all upon the lessons of his- 
tory, and that is, if war comes, just as surely then 
will come, at war's close, a great revival, a great 
renaissance, a new era in education. It was so in 
Germany after the Napoleonic wars, it was so in 

121 



The College and the Shadow of War 

Germany and France after the Franco-Prussian 
War, it was so in Japan after the Kusso-Japanese 
War. In the midst of the Revolution, Thomas 
Jefferson withdrew to the legislature of Virginia 
to draft laws for a Virginia school system. At the 
close of the Civil War General Lee accepted the 
presidency of a college. Why should this happen 
apparently in contravention of the universal law 
that like begets like? When a nation is in th3 
midst of the diabolic fury of war, it is natural 
that it should think of shells and submarines, aero- 
planes and poisonous gases as the final arbiters 
of human destiny. But when the smoke of battle 
clears away, the persistent questioning of the hu- 
man spirit drives it to ask, How did all this come 
about? Has it a meaning? What is beyond? It 
sees submarine and aeroplane, shell and bayonet 
as the children of intellect, as servants of the pas- 
sions and ideas of men, and is forced to say if the 
servants are so great and so terrible what of the 
human spirit which they serve? And so man re- 
turns to education, to the attempt to draw out the 
inexhaustible powers of the mysterious being man. 

Some never mend their roofs when it is not 
raining because they do not need a whole roof' 
then, and when it is raining it is too late. This 
is another lesson which war teaches regarding edu- 
cation. 

When war is as near as it is to-day, we feel in- 
stinctively that it is as wrong to attempt to pro- 
claim war from the advertising columns of the 
newspaper as it is to attempt to direct the policy 

122 



The College and the Shadow of War 

of the nation toward peace by a postcard poll. 
The die was cast long since. Not Emperor Wil- 
liam, not the German staff of 1914, but the Nietsch- 
ian philosophers of the superman, and the im- 
perialistic dreamers molded Germany's destiny. 
Not von Moltke and Hindenburg, but his boyish 
heroes, Theodoric, Frederick the Great. It re- 
quires the storm to demonstrate the significance 
of a sand or rock f omidation. It requires a great 
national crisis such as war to show that the acad- 
emic molds the practical more than the practical 
molds the academic. It is a mistake to think of 
war as a test of the relative importance of mind 
and matter, of brute force against ideas, as many 
conceive it. The war of to-day is the child of 
mind just as surely as the school is the child of 
mind. If your purpose is to kill then if you are 
intelligent you will use the tools best fitted for 
killing, just as, if your purpose is to cure you will 
use the drugs best adapted to curing. Mind will 
not be a Christian Scientist in war any more than 
in medicine. War may, therefore, shift the em- 
phasis in education, it may change the curriculum, 
it will not substitute God and gunpowder, or gun- 
powder as God for the orderly knowledge of man 
and the universe, even though that universe may 
include more shells and submarines. 

Loyalty to Lafayette then should grow and find 
a rebirth in loyalty to nation even if that loyalty 
shall mean war. War will make us very con- 
scious of the defects in our education, and we 
shall be more ready to give to Lafayette and to 

123 



The College and the Shadow of War 

other colleges and technical schools the money 
necessary for adequate teaching. 

As Admiral Fiske has said recently, the nation 
that invents will win, whether it is the cheese box 
on the raft, the tank, the submarine, or the pill 
on the pole, victory will be not with the well drilled 
soldier who never does anything but what he has 
been trained to do, but with the adventurous mind 
in the scientist's laboratory. 

There is a good deal being said to-day about 
universal service as the essential element in mili- 
tary preparedness, and a good deal remains to be 
said, but it will have to be a more comprehensive 
universal service than that conceived by the De- 
partment of War if it is to be effective. To call 
upon our colleges to train their young men for 
service in the trench or behind the mortar, and not 
at the same time to organize men for work in the 
machine shop or in the coal mines, nor make pro- 
vision for more technical advisers of the Govern- 
ment, for Geheimrats in economics, in history, in 
international law, in chemistry, in biology, in agri- 
culture, for more Ph.D.^'s in chemical engineer- 
ing, more mechanical engineers, more financiers 
and inventors, is to make the same mistake as the 
child mind which conceives the policeman as the 
Government of New York. On one thing America 
seems to have clearly made up her mind, if it be- 
comes a question between installing the soldier as 
schoolmaster, or installing the schoolmaster as 
warrior, America will choose the latter. War to- 
day is too complex to be entrusted solely to the 

124 



The College and the Shadow of War 

fighter. The war is costing England a million 
dollars an hour, it is reported. If you give La- 
fayette a million dollars for its chemical depart- 
ment and the result is an invention which would 
shorten the war an hour, it would pay for itself. 

Huxley in a public lecture at the London Royal 
Society once said : 

''Pasteur's discoveries alone would suffice to 
cover the war indemnity of five milliards paid by 
France to Germany in 1870. ' ' No ! Let us keep 
our faith in education even in these war times, and 
when we are tempted to prize the man of action 
above the man of thought, let us remember the 
reply of a friend to one who sought Pasteur as a 
physician: ''He does not cure individuals, he 
only tries to cure humanity." 

Science's last analysis of matter speaks of col- 
lisions of electrons as the basis of all that is real 
and beautiful. We shall not be unscientific, there- 
fore, if we see in the collisions of this awful year 
of war the fundamentals of a more beautiful world 
than we have yet known. We want to know how 
real moral law is in the universe. Is it a polite 
convention, which we may discard as we do our 
clothes when we have to swim for our lives, or are 
collisions with the moral law just as real, just as 
much to be reckoned with in the real world, as 
collisions of the subdivided atom? 

We revere to-day the memory of Lafayette. 
We think of him as the wealthy aristocrat, the 
distinguished officer, the friend of Washington, 
the idol of a grateful people. We forget the La- 

125 



The College and the Shadow of War 

fayette the exile, imprisoned for five long years, 
first by the King of Prussia with heavy manacles 
locked on hands and feet in a cell so damp that all 
hair came off his head, and later in a worse dun- 
geon by Francis of Austria, with no word to 
friends of his whereabouts or whether he was dead 
or alive. 

We forget the message sent to the imprisoned 
Frenchman who had had to flee from his own 
country because, while himself a soldier, he was 
not willing to give the right of government un- 
restrictedly into the hands of the greatest soldier 
of modern times, that the King of Prussia would 
release him from prison if he would assist in con- 
quering France, and the response sent back with 
scorn: ''Tell your master, that 'Lafayette is still 
Lafayette.' " We forget the trials of the loyal 
wife, who was permitted by the Austrian Emperor 
to visit her husband in prison only on the condition 
that she should not come out of the prison again 
while she lived, or of the innocent daughters who 
for twenty-two months shared the imprisonment 
of their parents. We forget that the proposal to 
take steps for the relief of Lafayette was defeated 
not only in the British Parliament, but that on 
March 3, 1797, in the American Congress, a reso- 
lution requesting the President to take such meas- 
ures as he might deem it expedient to adopt, to 
restore to liberty our fellow citizen General La- 
fayette, was defeated by a vote of 52 to 32. We 
feel gratitude to France for Lafayette's part in 
the Eevolution and forget that he came in the face 

126 



The College and the Shadow of War 

of opposition from the governraent of France as 
well as from the government of England, and that 
his companion on his arrival was the Bavarian 
Baron de Kalb. 

Every man has two countries, said Franklin, his 
own and France, and so the world feels to-day, 
but a century ago we were on the verge of war 
with France to maintain the freedom of the seas, 
and the threat was then made that the French 
party in America would be stirred up to defeat the 
President at home if war should come. Loyalty 
is not as simple of definition as the Pennsylvania 
censors have found the definition of a proper kiss. 
The ^'Master, Master, and kissed him," may be in 
truth a betrayal. 

But though we may grope in the confusing 
kaleidoscope of human affairs for the government 
or people to whom we may be ever loyal, it is not 
so hard in the realm of ideas and ideals. La- 
fayette was Lafayette, and freedom was freedom, 
and constitutional government was constitutional 
government, in dungeon or beneath the Arch of 
Triumph, and the words of Lafayette, who had ex- 
perienced both a dungeon and triumph, in reply 
to the farewell address of John Quincy Adams are 
worthy our loyalty to-day — ''The cherishing of 
that union between the States, as it has been the 
farewell entreaty of our great paternal Washing- 
ton, and will ever have the dying prayer of every 
patriotic American, so it has become the sacred 
pledge of the emancipation of the world; an ob- 
ject, in which, I am happy to observe, that the 

127 



The College and the Shadow of War 

American people, while they give the animating 
example of successful free institutions, show them- 
selves every day, more anxiously interested." 

I toast, therefore, in the words of Lafayette, 
''America, the sacred pledge of the emancipation 
of the world" — and I join with it, a toast to his 
namesake, our own Lafayette, and to its motto, 
"VERITAS LiBERABiT, " the truth shall make you free, 
in the words placed on Lafayette's triumphal 
floral arch in Washington : 

' ' Our fathers in glory now sleep 
Who gathered with thee to the fight, 
But the sons will eternally keep, 
The tablet of gratitude bright. 

We bow not the neck, 

We bend not the knee, 

But our hearts, Lafayette, 

We surrender to Thee." 



128 



POOLING OF COLLEGE INTEEESTS AS 
A WAR MEASURE 

THERE is a widespread feeling that American 
education is not organized to make its great- 
est contribution to the war. The experience of 
the last six months has shown that the need is two- 
fold : first, the need on the part of the Government ; 
second, the need on the part of the colleges; that 
in both cases the need is not so much for unity 
of spirit and purpose as for coordination, which 
is unity at work. 

The Government at Washington needs during 
the war an administrator of education of some 
sort who will be of sufficient dignity and authority 
to rank with the food and coal administrators, and 
to have authoritative standing with the chief of 
staff. His function would be to coordinate the 
demands made upon education by the Government 
in the prosecution of the war. 

The colleges need a war council with at least 
seven bureaus — a bureau of propaganda, of legis- 
lation, of statistics, of finance, of promotion, of 
personnel and of international relations, as well as 
national officers, who shall make the educational 
point of view at least as potent in the councils 
of the nation as that of organized labor, or of the 

An address delivered before the Association of American Col- 
leges, at Chicago, January 12, 1918, 

129 



Pooling of College Interests 

anti-liquor movement, or of woman's suffrage. I 
will present briefly some of the considerations 
which have led me to these conclusions. 

Lord Bryce in his recent article on the ''Worth 
of Ancient Literature to the Modern World, ' ' says, 
''The Greeks, like children, saw things together 
which moderns have learnt to distinguish and to 
keep apart. ' ' I want to ask you either to go back 
with the Greeks or forward with the little children 
of the Kingdom this morning and see things to- 
gether which as moderns we have learned to dis- 
tinguish and keep apart. For, as the vice-presi- 
dent of the Guaranty Trust Company told the 
Illinois bankers, perhaps the greatest lesson we are 
learning from our excursion ' ' over the top ' ' is the 
need of national unity. Unity is the watchword 
of the day, whether on the battle line in Italy, the 
council chamber in Paris, in the Shipping Board at 
Washington, or in this Association of American 
Colleges. The sacrifices demanded of the individ- 
ual citizen in the name of patriotism have taught 
a gospel of assent to a land where individualism 
and dissent had become rampant. Even before 
the war the organization of this association ex- 
pressed the need for greater unity of action among 
colleges, and this year the word "cooperation" 
appears with special prominence on this pro- 
gram. I wish to raise the question whether our 
colleges can go farther than cooperation, and by 
pooling their interests for the war advance the 
national interest. 

The present popularity of the word "pooling" 
130 



As a War Measure 

reminds me that I have lived through a complete 
era. As an undergraduate student, I wrote an 
essay in competition for a prize on ''The Inter- 
state Commerce Commission," then a new experi- 
ment in government, and a device inaugurated by 
a people to whom the word "pooling" was an- 
athema. To-day the readiness of the railroads to 
pool freight, and to maintain joint traffic bureaus, 
expediting the necessities of the war by the most 
direct lines, excites only the highest praise and 
admiration. The readiness of one road to become 
a freight road, while another remains a passenger 
road, the sharing of pet terminals and the yielding 
of trade-marks such as "Your Watch is Your 
Timetable," "The Standard Eailroad of Amer- 
ica, ' ' etc., indicates a submergence of institutional 
pride which no one would have thought possible 
three years ago. Up to this time the necessities 
of the war have not forced upon educational insti- 
tutions any such radical change of program as in 
the case of the railroads. The necessity, which is 
said to be the mother of invention, is discerned by 
the far-seeing college men on the horizon, but is 
not yet upon us. We have not heard from Eng- 
land, France, Canada, or even Germany, of any 
constructive changes in the educational program 
or institutional life due to the war. We know that 
the colleges stand empty; we know that they have 
been used for hospitals and for military barracks ; 
we know that women are replacing men as students 
in increasing numbers ; we know the manifold serv- 
ices rendered the state by members of the faculties 

131 



Pooling of College Interests 

in the guidance of public opinion, in scientific in- 
vention, in specialized governmental service. We 
have noted the leveling effect of the war in the 
pamphlet on "British Universities and the War," 
which reports the activities of Manchester, Birm- 
ingham and Leeds on complete equality with Ox- 
ford and Cambridge, and in the more significant 
proposal to readjust university representation in 
Parliament so as to extend the privilege to the 
provincial universities as well as to Oxford, Cam- 
bridge and London. But we have heard of no 
institutional program at all comparable to the con- 
structive program of our railroads. The colleges 
of America are casting about, therefore, for ex- 
amples and analogies in other fields of human ac- 
tivity which they may safely follow. The college 
trustee who is a railroad man naturally thinks 
that the colleges should do something similar to 
what the railroads are doing; the college trustee 
who is a dry goods man naturally thinks that the 
college should do something similar to what the 
drygoods stores are doing — adopt the slogan, 
''Business as Usual," and as sales fall off increase 
the size of advertisements in the daily papers and 
enter into a costly and frantic competition for the 
patronage which remains. The college trustee 
who is a broker naturally feels that the colleges 
should do somewhat as the bankers and brokers 
are doing — get a leave of absence from their regu- 
lar work and help the government by raising 
money for the Eed Cross or by selling Liberty 
bonds. The college trustee who is a manufacturer 

132 



As a War Measure 

naturally feels that the college, like the manufac- 
turer, should adapt its plant to the needs of the 
war, discontinuing the Latin and Greek lines and 
enlarging the output in the direction of chemistry, 
explosives and gas engines. So that just as the 
plant which in peace time makes drills for wells, 
now makes steel casings for shells, so the college, 
which in peace time makes scholars, will in war 
time make soldiers; the college, which in peace 
time seeks to refine human material, will in war 
time adopt the processes which tend to toughen 
and harden. 

War, in the words of the Battle Hymn of the 
Republic, ''tries out the souls of men before the 
judgment seat" in many ways. To the teacher it 
is a great test of his educational faith. Every col- 
lege man to-day asks himself, "Is what we are 
teaching important? Are we teaching it as fast 
as we can, or as thoroughly? Are we developing 
our men physically to the best advantage?" 
Those whose educational houses are builded upon 
the sand have already been swept away; those 
whose educational faith has firm foundations have 
had their belief in the importance of their task 
reenf orced by recent events ; and just because the 
storm has blown away a lot of the unessential dec- 
orations, see the essentials and their significance 
more clearly. Such a company of educators 
naturally ask themselves, ''How can we best per- 
form a task fraught with such importance for the 
nation?" Shall we enter upon a ruthless period 
of competition? Shall we take the road of the 

133 



Pooling of College Interests 

department stores and increase our appropria- 
tions for advertising, send out more agents to 
drum up trade, lower educational standards, pro- 
vide short cuts to degrees, reduce tuition fees, 
offer special inducements in the way of scholar- 
ships and free rooms, and so each of us in his own 
way do his share to increase the number of college- 
trained men in the nation and save our institutions 
from extinction ? Or, is there some better way by 
which our joint expenditures in advertising can be 
directed against ignorance and forces of reaction, 
our agents ' efforts be directed toward augmenting 
the total number of college students in the country 
rather than toward increasing our own enrollment 
at the expense of less wide-awake and energetic 
institutions'? Shall we create a sincere spirit of 
cooperation which will be ''each for all and all 
for each"? Can we organize some sort of strate- 
gic war board which will secure for the important 
interests of education as able and watchful leader- 
ship as is enjoyed by the labor unions, by the anti- 
liquor forces, or by the cause of woman's suffrage? 
For there is no question about the importance 
of education for war. Brains, trained brains, will 
win the war. War is to-day so much a matter of 
delicate and intricate scientific apparatus that only 
the nation equipped for scientific education can 
win. But if ''brains" is the first word of the 
countersign by which we pass to victory, the 
second is "coordination." As Major-General 
Squier said recently in Washington, ' ' In the army 
of to-day arms are so accurately balanced that co- 

134 



As a War Measure 

operation is the keynote of the whole thing." If 
the artillery continues to blaze away too long you 
kill your own men. When the barrage stops the 
front line men must be ready. Communication 
between aeroplane, artillery and trench must be 
absolutely accurate and instantaneous. Had it 
been so at Gallipoli the whole history of the war 
would have been changed. Unity of spirit is es- 
sential, but coordination is no less so. The one 
will give us a mob, the other an orderly proces- 
sion. The great manufacturers, like the General 
Electric, Western Electric, the railroads and the 
automobile manufacturers, have already demon- 
strated that America excels her allies in her 
readiness to pool individual interests for the suc- 
cess of the war. We already have more of this 
spirit manifested in America than is known in 
England after three years of war. The same 
spirit exists among the educational leaders of the 
country. Nowhere has the response been more 
prompt or more unanimous to the country's sum- 
mons. Education has shown a laudable readiness 
to follow, but for some reason it has lacked leader- 
ship and coordination. Perhaps this is due to 
the fact that under our theory of government edu- 
cation is a state, not a national function. Perhaps 
it is due to an old jealousy between the scholar and 
the soldier ; between the military caste and the men 
of books, which has come down through the cen- 
turies and finds expression in our own adjutant- 
general's office. Perhaps it is due to jealousy be- 
tween labor and the high-brow, and democracy's 

135 



Pooling of College Interests 

natural suspicion of the expert. Whatever the 
cause, it is an undoubted fact that education is one 
of the last great factors in our civilization to or- 
ganize for the war. Various war agencies have 
made use of existing educational organizations for 
recruiting, for the Eed Cross, for Liberty bonds, 
but education has not organized herself for her 
own no less important work. 

It is time that we were finding answers to the 
question whether the colleges cannot subordinate 
institutionalism to the common welfare without 
sacrificing that characteristic college institution- 
alism which is one of the richest possessions of the 
American people and which encourages so much 
loyalty and self-sacrificing devotion. Whether 
there is not perhaps some constructive program 
open to the colleges which shall be neither the road 
of the department store nor the road of the rail- 
road, but which shall make good our boast that 
education marches in the van of evolution, and is 
the first to adapt itself to new conditions. 

It is clear enough what we have to expect in the 
next two or three years if the war continues and 
the colleges are left each to do the best that it can 
for itself. We all know the symptoms to which I 
have referred. The entrance requirements will be 
less rigidly enforced, free rooms will be offered in 
empty dormitories, college fees will be cut, the col- 
lege year will be shortened, degrees will be offered 
in three years instead of four, instructors will be 
enticed by larger salaries, more money will be 
spent on advertising and promotion. Not only 

136 



As a War Measure 

will the colleges be shorn of their young men, but 
the few that remain will be secured at such a 
heavy cost, and at the price of such inducements, 
as not only to empty the treasury, but to pervert 
the relation of teacher and student. 

The colleges, however, are not blind to the les- 
sons taught by the Eed Cross and Y. M. C. A. cam- 
paigns. It is evident that during the war the most 
eifective appeals will be those which are nation- 
wide. If money is to be secured for education 
there must be some way of driving home the truth 
that education, even though represented by a mul- 
tiplicity of institutions, is national in its scope and 
purpose. Neither are the colleges blind to the 
economies which are being effected in so many 
directions. If non-essential industries must shut 
down for lack of fuel, it is evident that non-essen- 
tial college buildings will have to close for lack of 
fuel. It has even been suggested that December, 
January and February be taken for vacation in- 
stead of June, July and August. If the Standard 
Oil companies have to discontinue dividend notices 
to stockholders because of the increase in the cost 
of postage, it is evident that colleges must econo- 
mize even in 3-cent stamps. If women are to re- 
place men on street cars and elevators, on farms 
and in munition factories, it will not be strange if 
they replace men to some extent as instructors in 
laboratories and class rooms. If college instruc- 
tors and technical men continue to be drafted for 
government service, it is evident that the few that 
are left will have to teach overtime — labor union 

137 



Pooling of College Interests 

rules to the contrary notwithstanding. There are, 
it is true, serious difficulties in the way of pooling 
interests. It is comparatively easy to pool rail- 
road interests when there is more than enough 
traffic to go round, and every track is full, because 
then every facility can be used to its utmost. It 
would be a more difficult matter to pool depart- 
ment store interests in the face of a shrinking 
market, because there is not enough to go around, 
and whatever the division everybody would be dis- 
satisfied. In education the shrinkage has been 
even greater, and will be greater still in each suc- 
ceeding year. So that any pooling of the traffic 
would still leave the educational facilities in a cer- 
tain measure unused. If you have a large roast 
of beef it is a relatively easy matter to carve it 
on the table, but if it is a duck, and a very thin 
one at that, there is a great advantage in individ- 
ual service. I don't know how the professors feel, 
but I imagine the college presidents would be quite 
ready to accept, like the railroads, a government 
administrator for the period of the war, if like the 
railroads the colleges could be guaranteed a net 
income equal to that of the last three years. The 
Supreme Court, however, has not yet included edu- 
cation within that very elastic phrase "commerce 
between the states," and even in war time the 
Federal Government will probably not venture to 
do for education what it has done for the railroads. 
If, therefore, the problem is to be satisfactorily 
solved, it must be divided into two parts. First, 
the coordination of the war demands of the Gov- 

138 



As a War Measure 

ernment upon education, which can be effected by 
the appointment of an educational administrator 
at Washington, and second, the coordination of 
the efforts of American colleges and universities 
so that they may efficiently perform their duty in 
the present crisis. 

You are all familiar with the various attempts 
made within the past year at Washington to secure 
the cooperation of education for the war. An 
effort to secure enlargement of the powers and 
functions of the Bureau of Education, the revival 
of the plan to make education a separate depart- 
ment with a seat in the Cabinet, seems to be still 
stranded on the shoal of Congressional opposition. 
In the advisory commission of the Council of Na- 
tional Defense education was tacked on to engi- 
neering as an afterthought, and Dr. Godfrey has 
struggled heroically to span the two great fields as 
a Colossus of Rhodes. A good many cargoes, as 
you know, have passed between his legs in the last 
two months. Dean Mc'Clelland and the Intercol- 
legiate Intelligence Bureau have made some con- 
tribution to the problems of personnel and still 
maintain a somewhat precarious foot-hold in the 
scheme of things. Now comes the Federal Board 
for Vocational Education, and because they hap- 
pen to have some money to spend think they are 
fitted to serve the Government as intermediary be- 
tween the Government and education, not only in 
the field for which they were created and to which 
their expenditures must by law be restricted, but 
in other fields as well,, and while they grasp for 

139 



Pooling of College Interests 

higher education they fail to serve their own par- 
ticular field, and the Shipping Board and the De- 
partment of Labor, also having some spare cash, 
start out on their own account in the fields of 
secondary vocational education. 

What the surgeon-general can get in the way of 
education for his recruits, the chief engineer is 
finally convinced is good for his division, and what 
is good for the chief engineer is good for the chief 
signal officer, and what is good for them is good 
for the quartermaster and the ordnance depart- 
ment, and so education, ready to serve, but with 
no representative with standing or authority on 
a par with that of a Secretary of War or Secretary 
of the Navy, with no priority board chairman, with 
no railroad director or administrator, becomes 
servant to all, and is expected to serve not two 
masters, but certainly seven with all the confusion 
and uncertainty therein involved. It is rumored 
that the Department of War wants an educational 
director on its staff, to take over, not only the edu- 
cational activities of cantonments, but all ques- 
tions in which the Department of War and the col- 
leges are concerned. But, of course, the educa- 
tional director of the War Department would not 
know what the Navy educational director was 
about to propose, much less what the Federal 
Board of Vocational Education, the Committee on 
Engineering and Education of the Advisory Com- 
mission of the Council of National Defense, or the 
departments of Labor, Agriculture and the Inte- 
rior had on the slate. 

140 



As a War Measure 

It is evident that the necessities of war require, 
not only some kind of pooling of educational inter- 
ests, but some kind of an administrator of educa- 
tion at Washington to whom the various govern- 
mental departments can present their educational 
needs, and where the various demands on the edu- 
cational resources of the country can be coordi- 
nated. I propose, therefore, an administrator of 
education, to rank with the administrator of food 
and the administrator of coal, and to occupy a seat 
in the War Council. 

Not only is there need, however, of coordination 
in education from the standpoint of the govern- 
ment's war needs, but there is also need of coordi- 
nation of educational efforts on the part of the in- 
stitutions for themselves. Everywhere in the edu- 
cational world is felt the need of some machinery 
to voice the educational mind, to act for the educa- 
tional will, and to beg for the educational purse. 
Various suggestions have already been made for 
meeting this need. It is a good rule in war time, 
whenever possible, to convert to war uses whatever 
structure or organization is at hand, and it may 
be that this Association of American Colleges 
under the enlightened leadership of Dr. Kelly, can 
organize the War Board that we need, or if not 
this association alone, perhaps this association 
with representatives of other similar organiza- 
tions, such as the Association of American Univer- 
sities, Association of State Universities, etc., 
might organize such a board. This board ought to 
represent the colleges as distinct from the Govern- 

141 



Pooling of College Interests 

ment, though in hearty sympathy and cooperation 
with it. It ought to have national representatives 
at Washington to give effective expression to any 
questions of national policy upon which the organ- 
izations represented may agree. The National 
Education Association has recently opened a secre- 
tary 's office in Washing-ton, making a small but 
wise beginning in this direction for the public 
school interests. Higher education ought, par- 
ticularly, to be heard speaking with no uncertain 
voice when the question of lowering the draft age 
comes before Congress — it ought to be heard 
speaking with no uncertain voice when questions 
of taxing legacies to colleges come before Congress 
— it ought to have an official representative to 
speak for education when a plan is being worked 
out for universal military training. In a word, 
higher education needs a national council and na- 
tional officials to make effective their point of 
view, enlarge their opportunities for service, se- 
cure appropriate legislation, mold public opinion 
and secure an adequate share of financial support. 
Such a War Board should have at least seven 
bureaus : A Bureau of Propaganda, analogous to 
that undertaken by Sir Gilbert Parker and Pro- 
fessor McNeill Dixon, of Glasgow; a Bureau of 
Legislation to guard educational interests in Con- 
gress ; a Bureau of International Relations to take 
up educational questions which affect our allies as 
well as ourselves ; a Bureau of Personnel to make 
sure that every teacher in the present emergency 
is being used to the best advantage ; a Bureau of 

142 



As a War Measure 

Promotion to dream dreams and see visions for 
American education and to bring them to the atten- 
tion of the American people, and a Bureau of 
Finance to do for education on a large scale what 
the national boards have been able to do for the 
Eed Cross and the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation. If the continuance of education is a pa- 
triotic service we must see too that it secures 
recognition as such, by such devices of iron 
crosses, uniforms, service stripes and titles, of red 
and blue triangles and crosses, as appeal to the 
imagination of democracy. The patriotism of the 
marine who guards the sugar plantation in Cuba, 
of the farmer who plants potatoes, of the college 
professor who teaches French to the soldier, is 
seen and applauded. The medical scientist wears 
his reserve officer's uniform in the laboratory, but 
the uniforms of teachers even in the ground 
schools of aviation have recently been taken away 
from them. I do not say that America has yet 
reached the point where either a uniform or a 
title is needed to make the citizen a servant of the 
nation, but if these things are needed for the popu- 
lar imagination, American teachers must have 
them. 

We must organize joint campaigns to increase 
the supply of students, as otherwise any attempt 
on the part of the college to secure students will 
be regarded as a selfish attempt for the benefit of 
the institution, and at the expense of the war. We 
must encourage wherever possible the differentia- 
tion of functions and make it easy for competing 

143 



Pooling of College Interests 

institutions to give up to each other certain fields 
of instruction. If the war continues and the sup- 
ply of instructors decreases more rapidly than the 
number of students, we must devise some method 
by which specialists can give half of their time 
to one institution and half to another. We must 
establish some kind of a labor exchange, with 
which perhaps the Carnegie Foundation would co- 
operate to insure the most efficient use of all the 
teachers available. We must adopt a code of pro- 
fessional ethics which will discourage the calling 
of members of college faculties from one institu- 
tion to another on short notice in the midst of the 
term by offers of higher salary. Finally, we must 
appoint a committee to consider how the deficits 
of the colleges in this Association, caused by the 
war, are to be financed as a matter of general 
national policy. With the immense expansion of 
governmental activity, due to the war, there will 
be a strong disposition to have the Government 
control the industries of the country and pay all 
bills. It is evident that the salvation of the insti- 
tutions represented in this Association does not lie 
in that direction, but rather in the direction of the 
national campaigns of the Eed Cross and the Y. M. 
C. A., in nation-wide and universal appeals. So 
far as I know, there has never been in America 
a joint meeting of any kind of college trustees. 
With the readiness of business men to give their 
services to national movements connected with the 
war, it is conceivable that even college trustees 
might be brought together for action. The Grer- 

144 



As a War Measure 

man General von LudendorfP made a remark apro- 
pos of the recent War Council in Paris that ''when 
nations were at their wits' ends they called a 
War Council. ' ' It was a stinging challenge from 
autocracy to democracy. We have given individ- 
ualism free play in America, and we all admire 
what private initiative has been able to do, not 
only in building its own institutions but in creat- 
ing a faith in education in the American people 
which has made possible education through the 
state with popular approval and support. We 
must now show ourselves farsighted and broad 
enough to again blaze a new path and point the 
way to the American people for a constructive war 
program for American education, by a willingness 
to submerge the individual glory of our institu- 
tions in a common pool for the public welfare. 



145 



FEDEEAL LEAJDERSHIP IN EDUCATION 

ONLY a year ago we were quite unanimous in 
the opinion that the colleges needed, that the 
country needed, some national agency to coordin- 
ate American education and to increase the effec- 
tiveness of college service in the winning of the 
war. 

We talked of a national administrator of edu- 
cation, and we went from the meeting of this as- 
sociation to other conferences here and in Wash- 
ington, and organized an Association of National 
Education Associations which has come to be 
known as the American Council on Education. 
We went further, and carried to the Senate, to the 
House and to the White House, a report of what 
we understood to be the conviction of the educa- 
tional forces of America that education was not 
properly represented in the national councils, that 
American education had no international voice, 
much less an international hand or pocketbook. 

On January 31, 1918, we presented to Senator 
Hoke Smith, Chairman of the Senate ^s Committee 
on Education, a letter from which I will quote 
a paragraph to show that our thought went out 
beyond war time. The letter said : 

' ' The opportunity is before us of cooperating in 



Address before the Association of American Colleges, Chicago, 
January, 1919. 

146 



Federal Leadership in Education 

large educational undertakings with France, Eng- 
land and Italy and of helping in the educational 
reorganization of Eussia, and the educational 
awakening of China. Our educational relation- 
ships with the South American republics also are 
sure to grow rapidly in extent and in importance. 
We must act in all these matters as a nation and 
not as separate and individual states. While leav- 
ing to the states all the old measure of autonomy 
in their own educational systems, it will be neces- 
sary to provide some central and general agency 
through which they may all express themselves 
in policies which are either national or interna- 
tional in scope. 

''Since education is universally recognized as 
the first corollary of democracy, it seems incon- 
gruous that it should not be recognized as of equal 
rank in the councils of the nation, with that ac- 
corded Commerce, Labor and Agriculture, all of 
which have representatives in the President's 
cabinet. . . . The creation of a Department of 
Education would in our judgment unify, direct 
■and stimulate effort, and would give just recog- 
nition to the dignity and practical importance of 
Education in the national life. It would also 
establish a governmental agency for dealing with 
international educational problems of a rank co- 
ordinate with the educational departments of the 
majority of the great nations with which we shall 
be dealing.'' 

To-day, conditions are very different from what 
they were last year at this time. We were sure, 

147 



Federal Leadership in Education 

then, that we needed not only a Federal Leader, 
but even a Federal Administrator.' To-day we 
are not so sure. The pendulum has started on 
the return swing. We have had a taste of military 
dictation and it has left a bad flavor in our mouths. 
I understand that the only time the faculty of the 
University of Chicago ever voted unanimously on 
any subject was when they voted recently against 
continuance of military training in any form. 
The attempt to retain control of railroads, the ar- 
bitrary seizure of telephone and telegraph lines 
when the war was over, the frightful waste of 
bureaucratic circumlocution and stupidity, the ab- 
sence in American official circles of that sense of 
fair play which is so characteristic of better 
Americans in their private professional and busi- 
ness life, the excesses and blind tyranny, the sloth 
and greed of Bolsheviki and Soldiers and Work- 
men's Councils abroad, all these things make us 
skeptical as to the wisdom of casting the Federal 
Government for any more important role in the 
great drama of ''Education for a Democratic 
World," upon which the curtain of a new era is 
about to rise. 

There must, therefore, be cogent reasons for 
the step if it is to win our adherence and support. 
Arguments which will bear rough matter-of-fact 
handling. Ends which looked at in any light or 
from any angle will still appear desirable. 

For myself, I have reexamined in the light of 
the year's experience and changes, all the argu- 
ments which we advanced a year ago in the letter 

148 



Federal Leadership in Education 

to Senator Smith and I am as ready to subscribe 
to that letter as a declaration of faith to-day as I 
was a year ago. 

Like all great reforms we mistrust the proposal 
because of its very simplicity and obviousness. 
To the question, Is Education a national interest 
comparable in importance to agriculture, com- 
merce, labor? — the press, the trade-unions, the 
man in the street, are prepared to give an affirma- 
tive answer. The truth of the matter is, not that 
we don't recognize the significance of education 
in our national life but that we are all so much 
interested in education in America, that we all 
want to have a hand in it, and hesitate to set up 
a department, and say Education belongs particu- 
larly to this jurisdiction. Everybody wants to 
educate. Agriculture wants to teach, Commerce 
wants to teach, the Treasury wants to teach, the 
Post Office wants to teach. Labor wants to teach, 
the "White House wants to teach, the little country 
school district wants to teach and resents being 
consolidated with a neighboring district, while 
there is hardly a child born who is not ready at the 
age of five to explain the universe and direct the 
steps of his little brother of three. 

If there is a stumbling block in the road of 
Federal Leadership in Education, I should say 
it was not so much lack of appreciation of the 
importance of education in national life, as too 
widespread appreciation of the fun of playing 
teacher — and too little appreciation of the rich re- 
wards which com€^ to the teachable spirit. 

149 



Federal Leadership in Education 

You are all familiar enough with the subject 
to marshal each the arguments pro and con for 
himself. The arguments which I find most cogent 
naturally group themselves for me under three 
heads : 

(1) The International Argument 

(2) The National Ideal Argument 

(3) The Argument of Convenience. 

The International Argument is simply the argu- 
ment applied to education, which gave us in the 
first place our Union of States. If there had been 
no international problems, no problems of com- 
merce or war with other nations, we should prob- 
ably never have had any Federal Government. 
International relationships created the Federal 
Government. Up to this time our international 
relationships in education, in the world of science 
and letters, have been of minor importance. Now 
they are assuming a place of primary importance. 
If national ambitions are to be turned from ag- 
grandizement by war, to the satisfaction of hu- 
man needs and the improvement of the individual, 
then education, science and letters, must come to 
constitute a very large part of the stuif of inter- 
national intercourse. If war is to be impossible 
in the future, then we want educational attaches, 
as our eyes and ears and mouthpieces, at our for- 
eign legations, as well as military or naval at- 
taches and such other relics of a past age. 

And when the United States officially invites a 
foreign educational mission to visit this country, 
we want it arranged so that President Cowling 

150 



Federal Leadership in Education 

and Professor Schofield will not have to pledge 
their Carnegie pensions as security for the travel- 
ing expenses of the distinguished visitors, because 
the great United States, however friendly it may 
feel, however much it may desire closer relation- 
ships, is deaf and dumb and a penniless beggar 
when it tries to assume the role of International 
Educational Host. 

The second group of arguments I call the Argu- 
ment of the National Ideal. This is the argument 
woven from the stuff that dreams are made of, 
the lightest, airiest, toughest, most inescapable 
stuff we know. In America we have always had 
a right to make our state in our own image. We 
have never been taught to believe that the state 
was a ready made institution imposed on us by 
God. The writers of our Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and of our Constitution took care that 
we should be constantly reminded that our state 
was a device for human needs made for man, not 
man for the state, so that Man was Lord also of 
the state and could discard any particular form if 
it failed to work. 

And many of us, as we picture to ourselves our 
ideal state, are not satisfied that it shall be a state 
of merely soldiers and workmen 's councils, or even 
a state merely of successful business men, and 
farmers, capitalists and trades-unionists. The 
means to life have somehow in America usurped 
the place of life itself in our daily life as well as 
in our governmental organization, and we feel that 
one step in correcting this disorder and restoring 

151 



federal Leadership in Education 

a proper emphasis will be to give to education, to 
science, art and philosophy, at least equal recog- 
nition with commerce and agriculture in the 
scheme of things at Washington. 

Third, there is the group of arguments which 
we may call the Argument for Convenience or Effi- 
ciency, arguments which are matter of fact, and 
as easily demonstratable by experiment, as the 
argument from the National Ideal is cobwebby and 
illusive. Under this head I would group all the 
arguments which demand a Department of Educa- 
tion because there are specific tasks which we want 
done and we find we have no machine guaranteed 
to do them easily, promptly and inexpensively. 

While we may agree fairly well on the first two 
arguments and the conclusion which they will sup- 
port, we are likely to part company when we come 
to this third group of arguments. Naturally in a 
great country like ours one set of people want one 
thing done, another another thing. If a machine 
is to be set up, some say it must be a churn to 
miake butter, others, a sewing machine, others a 
pump, others an automobile for travel, others a 
phonograph, others a printing press. Probably 
we need all of them if our farm is to be completely 
equipped, but let us begin either by installing an 
electric wire with direct connections with the pub- 
lic treasury, or else a gas engine with a good fat 
appropriation barrel of oil, and having made sure 
of the supply of power we can hitch it up to any 
machine we may thereafter acquire for a specific 
need. If such a plan is too ideal, let us compro- 

152 



Federal Leadership in Education 

raise on some sort of a self-starting automobile in 
which we shall be able to travel not only, but 
which we can block up in the barn in the winter 
months and put to running the threshing machine, 
or to sawing wood. 

In this article I cannot go further than indi- 
cate the lines of argument. We hope the whole 
nation will turn itself into a debating society, and 
that the national policy will follow what proves 
to be the soundest argument. We must not be 
discouraged if the movement takes time. Mrs. 
Humphry Ward has recently claimed that the 
Fisher Education Act of last August, England ^s 
notable contribution to educational reconstruction, 
is for the most part simply an embodiment of the 
ideas of her Uncle Matthew Arnold, who held the 
office of Inspector of Schools from 1851 to 1886. 
In America twenty^ve years of agitation were 
required to produce the present Bureau and fifty 
years more have not been long enough to convince 
Congress of its right to larger appropriations. 
But the pace is quickening and the new Depart- 
ment will be ready for America when America is 
ready to use it. 

In the meantime what are the practical steps 
that are being taken toward the desired end! I 
have made an analysis of the legislation affecting 
education proposed during the present Congress. 
It was an illuminating and surprising study. 
Apart from the legislation dealing with education 
in the District of Columbia or other direct wards 
of Congress there have been about sixty different 

153 



Federal Leadership in Education 

bills introduced during the 65th Congress appro- 
priating some two or three hundred million dollars 
for education. These classify themselves gener- 
ally under four heads : 

(1) General legislation affecting the organi- 
zation and administration of federal educa- 
tion. 

(2) Legislation granting federal aid to engi- 
neering, agricultural and vocational education, 
three branches of education which have already 
received definite federal recognition. 

(3) Legislation providing for education in 
other special directions such as Americanization, 
illiteracy, public health, deaf and dumb, music, etc. 
etc. 

(4) Legislation providing federal financial aid 
for particular institutions. 

A score of bills belong to the last group and ap- 
propriate various amounts varying from the seven 
million acres to be given the schools of Nevada 
to the reduced carfare which is to be allowed a 
student from any part of the United States who 
studies in Washington. 

A score of bills belong to the third class and 
show immense originality and variety, from the 
bill providing for the establishment of a National 
Conservatory of Music and Art and prescribing 
how many rooms there shall be in each building 
and how many pupils each room shall hold, to the 
bill providing for investigating and teaching the 
science and art of manufacturing and using oleo- 
margarine and providing that oleo may be used 

i?4 



Federal Leadership in Education 

free from tax in college dining halls. Here also 
are the bills providing for a Federal Correspon- 
dence School, a Federal Board for Physical Cul- 
ture, and for a Bureau in the Department of Labor 
which shall give instruction in hygiene of mater- 
nity and infancy. 

In the second group there are only half as many 
bills but they make up for their small number 
by the huge size of the proposed appropriations. 
Here are the bills providing millions for voca- 
tional rehabilitation of wounded soldiers, estab- 
lishing schools and departments of mining, estab- 
lishing engineering experiment stations and pro- 
viding for a National Board of Engineering and 
Industrial Research, which may deal with any- 
thing in heaven above, in the earth beneath, or in 
the waters under the earth which bears on the 
welfare of the people of the United States. 

Finally, in the first group fall the bills in which 
we are particularly interested at this time, and for 
which the bills in the other groups illustrate the 
need and form one of the most obvious arguments. 
In the first group there are a number of war bills 
dealing with the display of the flag, the teaching 
of German, military training of various degrees 
and kinds. Leaving these aside there are three or 
four bills which bear directly on the question in 
hand. 

There is first Mr. Husted's bill providing for a 
commission of five persons to be appointed by the 
President to inquire into the condition of public 
education in the several States and to recommend 

155 



Federal Leadership in Education 

such measures as it may deem advisable for the 
improvement of the same, the commission to re- 
port on the following subjects particularly: the 
desirability of establishing a uniform system of 
public education throughout the United States 
under federal regulation and control; the advan- 
tages, if any, to be secured through federal legis- 
lation of uniform application throughout the 
United States; providing for compulsory educa- 
tion, registration of children, inspection of schools, 
examination and licensing of public school teachers 
and supervision of teaching; the desirability of 
establishing a national system of military educa- 
tion and training; the desirability of providing 
optional subjects in educational courses in col- 
leges and universities and the extent, if any, to 
which such selection should be permitted, to- 
gether with such constitutional amendment or 
legislation as may be necessary to carry the recom- 
mendations into effect. 

The bill illustrates very well what Dr. Kandel 
has so clearly pointed out in his study of the Land 
Grant Acts, namely how little any one conver- 
sant with education has to do with federal legisla- 
tion, actual or proposed, on education. A consti- 
tutional amendment to determine whether a sopho- 
more might have two or three electives in col- 
lege, would be federal leadership indeed. 

Then there is Mr. Sears ^ bill providing seventy- 
five million annually for scholarships in State Uni- 
versities and creating a Federal Board for Mili- 
tary Training; and various other plans for mili- 

156 



Federal Leadership in Education 

tary colleges, in the various States at federal ex- 
pense. 

There is Mr. Fess' bill to create a National 
University open only to those holding Masters 
degrees and giving no degrees itself, the Uni- 
versity to be governed by a Board of thirteen with 
the Commissioner of Education, Chairman, and by 
an Advisory Council made up of the State Uni- 
versity presidents. 

Then there is a bill which closely affects all col- 
lege presidents, because it provides that you can- 
not beg for your college without a license which 
you are to get from the Commissioner of Edu- 
cation by paying $2.50, and which is revokable at 
his pleasure. What a simple device that is to 
place all American education under the thumb of 
the Commissioner of Education, because of course 
if a college president could not beg, there would 
be no excuse for his existence. 

And finally, there is Mr. Owen's bill creating 
a Department of Education with a secretary with 
a salary of $12,000 and an assistant secretary at 
$6,000; and Senator Smith's N.E.A. omnibus bill 
which not only creates a Department of Educa- 
tion, and permits the President to transfer to the 
new Department such agencies of Government be- 
sides the Bureau of Education as he may deem 
wise, but which seeks to marshal various powerful 
forces behind the bill, by consolidating with it, 
the various bills for Americanization, improve- 
ment of Rural Schools, abolition of illiteracy, phy- 
sical training, and elevation of the teaching pro- 

157 



Federal Leadership in Education 

fession, and appropriating a round comfortable 
hundred million for the purpose. 

Political expediency may make it desirable to 
secure the support of powerful lobbying interests 
in this way, but I am of the opinion that just as 
the attempt to secure a Department of Education 
a few years ago failed when promoted by the 
Sage Foundation which had a special interest 
along the lines of child welfare, so the present at- 
tempt to place education where she ought to be in 
the councils of the nation is more hindered than 
helped by being made to carry with it certain 
specific purposes in which some of the people are 
interested and some not, and regarding which 
there is great diversity of opinion as to whether 
the cost should be borne by direct or indirect 
taxation. The same objection holds against the 
bill recently introduced in the House, which pro- 
poses a Department of Education and Human Wel- 
fare, thus saddling education, which has a very 
definite task to perform, with all the vagaries and 
schemes for human betterment which the fertile 
American imagination can invent. 

Of one thing I am quite sure nevertheless, and 
that is that in our plans for Federal participation 
in Education we want more of the leadership of 
ideas, and less of the compulsion of cash. The 
American people have already a deep distrust of 
efforts to direct moral and social movements by 
the persuasion of loaves and fishes, and the danger 
is equally great and insidious whether the loaves 
and fishes be in the hands of private individuals or 

158 



Federal Leadership in Education 

in the hands of office holders. If the Federal Gov- 
ernment is prepared to give freely to education 
I for one would favor receiving it gladly; but if 
the Federal Government proposes to exact a price 
for every dollar, then I say it is sounder econom- 
ics and better politics for the States to apply their 
own money directly to education rather than to 
pass it over to Washington to be bought back at 
a price. 

In the Morrell Act the grant was a gift practi- 
cally without conditions. In the vocational grant, 
a harder bargain is being attempted. In the 
Smith Bill even the pretense of free gift is cast 
aside, and the Federal Government appears 
frankly bargaining for control in the States in re- 
turn for its cash. 

This is a fatal defect which however is not essen- 
tial to the main purposes of the bill and which can 
be remedied. I think, however, that it is quite 
clear that if a change from State Education to 
Federal Education is desired, it should be secured 
openly on its merits by a constitutional amend- 
ment and not bought by the operation of sordid 
motives. 

"We have learned a good deal from our experi- 
ence with the S.A.T.C. the past year in more di- 
rections than one. For one thing it has set a new 
high standard for unselfish cooperation in educa- 
tion in the public service. With all the faults of 
the S.A.T.C. I think you will all agree that one 
of its great glories was the spirit of democratic 

159 



Federal Leadership in Education 

equality which controlled its administration. 
Small and great were treated equally. There 
was no respect of persons and no suspicion of 
service of any special interest. If we could al- 
ways have such enlightened bureaucrats we should 
be much more ready to place education in federal 
hands. But with all its purity of purpose, the 
S.A.T.C. experiment demonstrated also that our 
country is too big to hope for prompt, intelligent 
administration from a single center. We have 
come through the war I take it with a greater 
belief than ever in the fathers' wisdom in prizing 
so highly local self-government. We watched 
with interest the advantages of the local draft 
boards under federal direction and leadership and 
these lessons will, I judge, make us more likely 
to seek to retain State control of Education even 
though we seek to magnify federal leadership and 
make every effort to secure for education better 
representation in the national councils. 

Mark Baldwin says, ' ' The rank which the United 
States now occupies in art, science, and literature 
is not, by universal consent, lower than fourth 
among all the nations of the world." We dare 
not rest satisfied with fourth place. We covet 
earnestly the best gifts for our beloved land. 
We want first that our nation should lead us, and 
then that it should lead all mankind in the best 
things of the spirit. 

Rodrigues has pointed out that while French 
and Americans are both creative, it is their genius 

160 



Federal Leadership in Education 

to create by first bringing to birth the idea, while 
with us we plunge forward and act and the idea 
is born in the throes of action. 

We shall probably be true to our genius in this 
matter of federal leadership in education. We 
shall not first evolve a perfect plan for a federal 
department and then make the Department fit 
the plan, but the creators among us will plunge 
ahead, give us some legislation, however crude, 
and as we act and move forward and do something, 
a more perfect conception of the possibilities of 
federal leadership will emerge, which we shall all 
recognize at once as that true American leadership 
of Education for which we have all been blindly 
groping. 



lOl 



A NATIONAL DEPAETMENT OF 
EDUCATION 

THE proposal to create a national Depart- 
^ ment of Education with a Secretary of equal 
rank with the Secretary of Conunerce or the Secre- 
tary of Agriculture, and entitled to a seat in the 
President's Cabinet, is not a new one. The bill 
drawn by Emerson White and presented by Gen- 
eral Garfield at the close of the Civil War pro- 
posed such a Department, but during the discus- 
sion in Congress the Department was reduced to 
the rank of a bureau in the Department of the In- 
terior. The proposal, however, has taken on new 
significance as a result of the radical change in 
our international policies during the last three 
years. A nation which deliberately sought inter- 
national isolation had little need for a national 
representative of education. A nation which as- 
sumes the role of arbiter of the world's destinies 
and judge of the world's disputes must give the 
American school a national representative so that 
the United States may contribute to the world's 
education whatever it has of value, and learn 
from the school experience of other nations all 
that is to be learned. 
It is not a question of placing the administra- 

From The Nation, March 7, 1918. 

162 



A National Department of Education 

tion of schools in the hands of the national Gov- 
ernment. No one wants the national Government 
to administer the schools, nor could it do this 
without a constitutional amendment. It is not 
a question of introducing the national Government 
to a field of effort which hitherto it has not en- 
tered. Already its educational activities are 
manifold. The encouragement of colleges for ag- 
riculture, or the mechanic arts, the recent creation 
of a Board for Vocational Education, the research 
activities of the Bureau of Standards, the Naval 
Observatory, the Smithsonian Institution, as weU 
as the activities of the present Bureau of Educa- 
tion, testify to the fact that the national Govern- 
ment has already entered the field of education 
and feels at home there. 

We want a Department of Education, not to 
rule, but to serve, education in the States. As 
President Wilson said thirty years ago, ' ' The na- 
tion properly comes before the States in honor 
and importance, not because it is more important 
than they are, but because it is all-important to 
them and to the maintenance of every principle 
of government, which we have established and still 
cherish. The national Government is the organic 
frame of the States. It has enabled and still en- 
ables them to exist. '^ What is true of the States 
in their more general governmental functions is 
true also of education. We do not want a national 
Department of Education to supplant or replace 
our State Departments of Education; we want it 
because such a national Department is all-impor- 

163 



A National Department of Education 

tant to them, and because we believe education is 
the first corollary of democracy. 

Our forefathers, having suffered from an ex- 
cess of governmental activity, wanted government 
a negative rather than a positive force in our 
community life. Accordingly, they withdrew the 
whole field of religion and religious teaching from 
the territory open to legislative activity. A sim- 
ilar sentiment leads many to regard with appre- 
hension anything which looks towards greater 
governmental activity in the field of education. 
They admit the right of the national Government 
to step in and take charge of the youth of the 
country from sixteen to twenty years of age to 
prepare them for war, or so to order universal 
military training as to modify the whole educa- 
tional system of the United States, so long as it is 
done by the Department of War. They admit the 
right of the national Grovernment to establish any 
schools or to give any instruction necessary for 
the conduct of the present war, or any possible 
future war, yet hesitate at the thought of a 
national Department of Education, either in war 
or in peace. They allow the national Government 
to say what the American people may or may not 
read, so long as it is done through the Post Office 
Department. They strain at the gnat and swallow 
the camel. It is said that the hearing of the blind 
is peculiarly acute, that those who cannot see or 
hear develop extraordinary sensitiveness of touch, 
that if the legs are cut off, the arms are stronger. 
In the same way our nation, if by reason of ar- 

164 



A National Department of Education 

bitrary stricture not allowed to develop certain 
normal national interests, will develop others just 
so much more strongly. If as a nation we can give 
expression to our interest in agriculture, in com- 
merce, in war, in labor, but not to our interest in 
education, we shall become, as in the past we have 
shown a tendency to become, a nation of farmers 
and business men, or as we are now in danger of 
becoming, a nation of soldiers and workmen, and 
our Government, like Russia's, a Council of Sol- 
diers' and Workmen's Delegates. 

Whether we like it or not, the events of the war 
have made us a world power. During the next 
hundred years our international life will be more 
important than our intra-national life. What are 
to be the interests of this giant among nations'? 
What ends is our gold to serve? Into what are we 
to transmute our wealth or our treasure? If we 
profess adherence to the creed that aggrandize- 
ment of territory or power can no longer be the 
purpose of national life, what are we as a nation 
going to live for? The political philosophers have 
thought of only two alternatives : one, a good time ; 
the other, improvement. Up to the present time 
our Government at Washington is in the same mu- 
tilated condition in practice as Aristotle's Politics 
in theory; in both the section dealing with educa- 
tion is missing. 

But what specific things, it is urged, would be 
left for a national Department of Education to do, 
if the States all do their full share? There is 
at present a French Education Commission in 

165 



A National Department of Education 

America duly accredited by the French Grovern- 
ment. Who has authority to bid it welcome in the 
name of American education? The English uni- 
versities have proposed a commission to visit 
England and confer on questions of international 
interest. Whose business is it to take up the mat- 
ter for American education? China is emerging 
into a new civilization. Is she to model her 
schools on the Prussian system? The Russian 
Republic is groping for light educationally, as well 
as otherwise. Are her educational leaders to turn 
again to Germany? If not, whose business is it 
to express a national American interest in the edu- 
cation of her illiterate millions? South America 
is ready for closer relations educationally. Must 
the work be left to private foundations, or have we 
other interests than war which require national 
expression and national unity? 

The national Government gave liberally for col- 
leges of agriculture and mechanic arts, but it has 
had no way of making sure that the money was 
used for the purpose for which it was given. It 
has learned already that the nation which lacks 
scientifically trained men cannot wage war in 
these days, and if the chief end of the future were 
to be the waging of war, the national Government 
would have to take a greater interest than it 
has ever done before in the promotion of science 
and scientific research. Government has made 
heavy drafts on the colleges and universities for 
their trained scientists, economists, psychologists, 
linguists, public speakers, historians, and other 

166 



A National Department of Education 

experts in the present emergency. After such a 
demonstration, is the Government prepared to say 
to education after the war, '^ Washington is no 
place for you ; leave representation in the govern- 
ment machine to soldiers, farmers, and mechan- 
ics"? Or are we prepared to say: ''We have 
invested a billion dollars in school plants; and 
spend nearly a billion a year on running expenses ; 
we keep seven hundred thousand teachers con- 
stantly employed; we entrust to their charge the 
best years of twenty-two million American youth, 
an army as great in numbers as all the armies of 
all the nations now under arms. If America has 
any contribution to make to the world, it is her 
schools and the ideals of her schools. If we can- 
not always have for the head of the Cabinet a 
schoolmaster, at least let us have one Cabinet 
member who can talk internationally, not for 
ships, or shoes, or cabbages, but for schools and 
the American citizen of tomorrow"? 

To quote from Button and Snedden's "Educa- 
tional Administration in the United States ' ' : 

''It has been a matter of sincere regret to many that 
the United States has not given to education a place in 
the councils of the nation, equal to war or commerce. 
The work of raising the Bureau of Education to its 
proper dignity and equipping it to control and care for 
all the educational agencies which the Government un- 
dertakes, awaits the commanding effort of some great 
leader, who not only appreciates the crying evil of the 
present situation, but has the heart and the courage to 
take up the battle and win the victory. ' ' 

167 



WHY THE TRUST IDEA IS NOT APPLI- 
CABLE TO EDUCATION 

TEXJSTS, A FALLACIOUS ANALOGY FOE COLLEGES AND 
UNIVERSITIES 

THIS has been an age of trusts, of combina- 
tions and consolidations of all sorts, and the 
public imagination and reason have been influ- 
enced thereby. The arguments advanced in favor 
of trusts are : A lessening of cost of production, 
greater division of labor, with consequent speciali- 
zation of functions, and higher and better paid 
skill. To these may be added a wiser control of 
production and the elimination of waste. Two 
central ideas have consequently become firmly 
fixed in the public mind; first, the economy in- 
volved in combination, and second, the greater 
perfection and higher skill demanded and secured 
by the large organization as compared with the 
small organization. There is a natural disposi- 
tion accordingly, to extend the same methods to 
other than commercial fields. We see it in the 
work of the church. At the present time there is 
a movement in more than one of our principal 
denominations to consolidate and combine the 
work of various mission boards. We notice it in 
the case of individual churches in our large cities. 

Address for the Semi-Centennial of Westminster College, Ful- 
ton, Missouri. 

168 



The Trust Idea 

In New York in the last few years we have had 
at least two notable instances where two churches, 
both strong and abundantly able to support them- 
selves as independent organizations, have united 
to form one church, thus making the church more 
of a preponderant force, and the road easier finan- 
cially for members of both churches. 

There is at the present time a strong disposi- 
tion among many to extend the trust idea to col- 
leges and universities. They feel that the day has 
passed for small things in education — that nothing 
is worth doing which is not done on a large scale 
or as part of a large whole — that it is needless 
and wasteful expenditure of effort for the various 
churches to engage in separate educational enter- 
prises — that the same amount of work could be 
done much more satisfactorily and economically 
by a single joint institution, than by a half dozen 
scattered institutions, and at any rate, whether 
the advantages be greater or less, the business 
man feels himself entirely competent to judge one 
point, and that is, that it would be infinitely easier 
and cheaper for him and his partner were the five 
institutions reduced to one than it is to put their 
hands down into their own pockets and help make 
up the salary of an instructor, or pay the coal bill 
for a building. 

So widespread and so general is the belief in 
consolidations of this sort, that I need not spend 
time in an effort to be fair and Just by pointing 
out how much truth there is in it, or how well it 
would be if, under certain circumstances and under 

169 



Why the Trust Idea 

certain conditions, more heed were paid to such 
considerations by those entrusted with the man- 
agement of educational foundations. There is, at 
the present time, I am convinced, less danger of 
these principles of economy through consolidation, 
being slighted, than of a failure to recognize the 
objections and difficulties involved in an introduc- 
tion of the trust idea in education, and a dis- 
regard of the thoroughly sound and wise argu- 
ments in favor of a multiplicity of educational 
foundations. 

I wish, therefore, in this paper to urge the other 
side of the question. To recall the strong argu- 
ments in favor of individual initiative and of di- 
versification of effort. To show, if possible, that 
there is still wisdom in the old maxim that every 
man should hoe his own row, and every company 
bear its own burdens. To strengthen our faith in 
the soundness of judgment and foresight of the 
founders of our institutions, and to fix more firmly 
our faith in their future destinies. 

Taking up, then, the trust idea as applied to 
education, let us consider first what, for conven- 
ience' sake, I may call the local argument. When 
in the business world the factories in this or that 
particular town are closed by reason of their ab- 
sorption by a trust and the town perchance ruined, 
the people of that locality bring forward these re- 
sults as arguments against the trust idea. To 
these the answer is made that in estimating the 
economic advantages or disadvantages of any 
particular phase or development of industry, we 

170 



Is Not Applicable to Education 

must have regard to its effect not on this or that 
particular man, nor on this or that particular 
town or county, but to its effect on the nation or 
even the world as a whole. Just as some political 
economists argue for free trade on the ground that 
while it may not develop as high a civilization in 
this particular part of the world as protection 
might, yet the world as a whole will be better off. 
Can the same answer properly be made to the 
argument for a diversity of educational institu- 
tions on the ground that they supply a local need? 
I shall, I believe, command assent, if I say that the 
trust idea is not applicable to education as re- 
gards the location of educational institutions, be- 
cause, while industrial reasons may importantly 
affect the distribution of population and the popu- 
lation adjust itself ultimately to the new location 
of factories, population will not to any extent so 
adjust itself to the location of colleges. The argu- 
ment in behalf of a multiplicity rather than a con- 
solidation of colleges, is a sound one, which main- 
tains that the settlement of the question whether 
the American boy or girl is to enjoy a college edu- 
cation or not, will depend largely on whether the 
college is located within one hundred miles of the 
particular boy's or girl's home. To my mind this 
argument is an unanswerable one, and borne out 
by the statistics of attendance at our great insti- 
tutions. The exceptional boy or girl once started 
on the road towards an education will of course 
pursue it wherever it is to be found, and whatever 
the obstacles in the way of attainment. But the 

171 



Why the Trust Idea 

average boy or girl if the college or university is 
too far out of his ordinary environment and circle 
of thought, is not likely to venture on a tour of 
discovery into unknown lands. Eailroads and 
telegraphs and newspapers are binding the world 
closer together so that a man's neighborhood is 
much more comprehensive than it was fifty years 
ago, and yet if one goes into one of the counties 
in the center of the State of New York and asks 
the men he meets how often they have been in 
the metropolis, he is likely to be astonished at the 
home-keeping characteristics of his neighbors. 
It is the local teacher and the local institution 
which must create the demand and desire for a 
higher education. It is conceivable of course, as 
education became organized on the lines of a great 
trust, that just as the tobacco trust continues to 
cultivate a demand for its product in the most re- 
mote village by means of its traveling men, so the 
great centralized university by means of College 
Extension lectures and their traveling instructors, 
would cultivate the demand for learning and cul- 
ture in the most out-of-the-way points of the State. 
I say it is conceivable but it is not likely. "Wis- 
dom crieth aloud in the streets, but so far as his- 
tory shows, if you give knowledge a chance to be 
exclusive and oligarchical, she will seizq it. The 
first argument then, against the trust in education, 
is that unlike the factory, the college does not take 
its population with it. It only moves its culture. 
The local institution then exists not only to meet 
a local demand, but for the express purpose of 

172 



Is Not Applicable to Education 

creating such a demand in that particular locality. 

The second strong argument in favor of trusts 
is the argument based upon the reduction in the 
cost of production. In brief, the argument for 
economy. As applied to the educational world 
we may take up this argument from two stand- 
points. First, the saving to society at large, and 
second, the saving to the individual student. 
Taking the second first, the unanswerable argu- 
ment advanced by the Standard Oil Company has 
always been that oil was furnished to the con- 
sumer cheaper than it could have been without 
consolidation. So, too, I am inclined to believe 
that consolidation in the educational world might 
in the long run, perhaps, give the individual stu- 
dent his education at a somewhat less cost. 
Though this conclusion is open to considerable 
doubt. Certainly it has not been true thus far, 
that the larger the institution and the better en- 
dowed, the cheaper the cost to the student, but 
quite the contrary. Even if college fees are less, 
the cost of living shows a tendency to increase in 
proportion to the number of students. With the 
consolidation of educational institutions they 
would naturally gravitate to the larger cities 
where the cost of living is higher. 

We may say, therefore, that the economy for 
the student through consolidation is likely to 
come, if at all, not directly but indirectly. That 
is, he will spend the same for his education, but 
he will secure along with the education greater 
bodily comforts and intellectual luxuries. In edu- 

17s 



Why the Trust Idea 

cation as elsewhere, the law will hold that the 
more complex the civilization, the more expen- 
sive will be the scale of hfe. Nor is it always a 
sound argument in favor of the greater expenses 
involved in attendance at a large institution, that 
the greater range of subjects afforded is worth 
the additional cost. As a matter of fact, it often 
happens, that the very richness of the curriculum 
proves an embarrassment. If the university 
offers five highly specialized courses in economics, 
it is very probable that the college student who 
wishes only a general comprehensive outline of the 
subject, will be unable to find what he wants. 

A story is told of a remark made to the Dean 
of the Department of Economics at one of our 
large universities by a senior that, he had just 
listened to an explanation of the theory of the 
trade winds, for the seventh time, in seven dif- 
ferent courses, and that he was becoming slightly 
tired of that particular topic in economics. It 
often happens too, in the large institutions, that 
the apparent range of electives is fictitious, be- 
cause so many of the courses are offered at the 
same hour. The result is, that the under-graduate 
student may find it more difficult to arrange a satis- 
factory course of study at the large institutions 
than at the more modest small college. There is 
no economy, therefore, for the average man in 
paying for the great range of electives, if what 
he wants is merely a well proportioned and well 
selected college course. 

Turning now to the economy for the community 
174 



Is Not Applicable to Education 

in such consolidation of educational institutions, 
there can be no question that we have here an ar- 
gument which appeals strongly to the average 
man. Just as the American family in the large 
cities is gradually giving up its independent, sep- 
arate house, for the consolidated apartment house ; 
so the American is ready to have his half dozen 
colleges move into one building, because of the 
obvious economy involved. 

A college with one hundred students must have 
a professor of Greek, and a college with two hun- 
dred students must have a professor of Greek, 
but not two. A college with two hundred students 
must have a professor of French; but a college 
with four hundred students will require no more. 
A college with four hundred students may re- 
quire an instructor in Spanish ; but a college with 
eight hundred will probably be equally content 
with one man in this department. And, so, the 
business man of to-day, stating the problem thus 
to himself : Five thousand boys to educate in col- 
lege, will it cost more per head to educate them in 
one institution or in ten ; if he looks no further, is 
likely to say, the more consolidation, the more 
prevalent the trust idea, the better, because it 
saves the community money and effort. Now, 
such an argument is, of course, a sound one, so 
far as it goes, provided, we admit the truth of 
the conditions upon which it is based. As a mat- 
ter of fact, however, a careful study of educational 
finances makes one very skeptical as to whether 
there is any such great economy in the consolida- 

175 



Why the Trust Idea 

tion of educational effort. One man can teacli 
well only a certain number of men — not over forty, 
I should say, in the college grade. If a class ex- / 
ceeds this number, it should be divided into sec- 
tions, and to teach two sections of forty each in 
the same institution, is hardly less expensive than 
to teach one class of forty in each of two institu- 
tions. Again, the greater the organization the 
more red tape and the more machinery, and the 
more waste. Administrative work, which is done 
incidentally by professors in a small institution, 
requires in a large institution special officers. 
The college which has an annual budget of twenty 
thousand a year, is, of necessity more careful in 
the expenditure of a dollar than an institution 
which has an annual budget of two hundred thou- 
sand dollars a year. We are, I believe, too ready 
to take it for granted that consolidation must 
necessarily mean the elimination of unnecessary 
expense, and the consequent reduction in the aver- 
age cost of performing a specific piece of work. 

But, supposing that we admit for the sake of 
argument, that the individual student would save 
something in financial cost and the community 
would save something by educational consolida- 
tion, would there not be lost thereby, things of a 
value hard to reckon in dollars and cents ? There 
are a good many who feel that a clear case can 
be made out against trusts in the commercial world 
on this very ground. Supposing that it is true 
that I can get a coat, a sewing machine, a type- 
writer, a gallon of oil, cheaper by reason of the 

176 



Is Not Applicable to Education 

trusts, is there, after all, enough in the conse- 
quent increase of the things to eat and the things 
to drink and the things with which we shall be 
clothed, to compensate me and tens of thousands 
like me, for the loss of opportunity to be our own 
masters commercially, to conduct our own busi- 
ness in our own way, on our own responsibility, 
and feel ourselves free and equal individuals 
among many independent men, rather than mere 
cogs in a gigantic wheel? Tliis is not the time nor 
the place to say whether there are, or are not, 
such priceless considerations lost in industrial 
combines, which more than offset the financial 
economies. But if such arguments may be urged 
in the commercial world, which goes on the as- 
sumption that values can all be measured in dol- 
lars and cents, how much more properly might 
they be urged when we come to things of educa- 
tion; when we come to colleges which avow that 
the fruits of their labors are not such that you can 
weigh them in the balance over against so much 
gold? 

What are some of the things which we would 
lose were the trust idea to prevail in education? 
All that has been said in favor of the small col- 
lege would have to be reckoned on the debit side 
of the account, were we to blot out this class of 
institutions by consolidation. For myself, I be- 
lieve that there would be no economy to society 
at large, which could begin to compensate for the 
loss which it would suffer in the cutting off of the 
supply of that peculiar quality of manhood which 

177 



Why the Trust Idea 

has in the past issued from the small institutions 
and shown itself peculiarly fitted for leadership 
and great achievements in the State. 

But we must have regard not merely to the 
product, but also to the process. A fallacy creeps 
in when in an argument of this sort we introduce 
a co^unercial analogy, because in the industrial 
world the product is the only consideration. If it 
is crackers you are manufacturing, the question 
is, how many crackers, and of what flavor does 
a given method turn out. If it is needles, then 
what and how many needles. If straw hats, then 
what and how many straw hats. 

The value of a given process in the commercial 
world is reckoned solely by the value of its com- 
pleted products; the process is of no value in it- 
self. If we could pick from trees, or off a grocer's 
counter, crackers already done up in in-er-seal 
packages, we should have little concern as sociolo- 
gists whether there existed any cracker factories 
or not. In other words, it is solely the product 
which we seek in commercial industry and not the 
processes. The same is not true, however, of edu- 
cation, from the standpoint of the sociologist or 
the philosopher. 

If it were our lot to order the life of the universe 
and we were compelled to omit all that life which 
exists in the school and involves the relation of 
student and teacher in the pursuit of truth for 
truth ^s sake, and the study of the best in letters 
and in history and philosophy for its own sake, 

178 



/5 Not Applicable to Education 

we should feel that we had been set a task and at 
the same time denied most desirable material 
for the proper completion of that task. In other 
words, school and college life are to be followed 
not only as a means of preparation, but as good 
things in themselves. In so far as they involved 
the pursuit and contemplation of truth for its 
own sake, they are an occupation which from the 
days of Plato down to the present, have properly 
been regarded as among the highest forms of ac- 
tivity open to men. It is to the interest, therefore, 
of every community, not only to have educational 
machinery for turning out well equipped men, but 
also to have the process going on in their midst, 
and open to the participation, in one way or an- 
other, of all their citizens. 

The argument advanced in favor of the eight- 
hour day by the trades-unions is that the work- 
ing man should have at his disposal certain hours 
for those pursuits which elevate and ennoble. 
This is a recognition of the value to a conmiunity 
of having such pursuits cultivated. It ought to 
be the laudable ambition of every state, not only 
to have great manufactories, rich farms, produc- 
tive lands, stately public buildings, and beautiful 
homes within its borders, but to have also its own 
great men, its own statesmen and orators, and 
authors and poets, its own scholars, its own great 
teachers. We ought to recognize that civic pride 
demands quite as truly that the men in the South 
and West should flock to New York to sit at the 

179 



Why the Trust Idea 

feet of great teachers, as that they should flock 
to New York to buy their fall and spring silks 
and cottons. There is but one way in which a 
state can secure such men for itself, and that is 
by the estabhshment of permanent foundations, 
which shall furnish them an honorable position 
and a reasonable livelihood, while they pursue 
their chosen work. It is not economy, therefore, 
to a state with such civic pride to reduce, by 
consolidation, its professors in Greek, and to have 
one teacher where formerly there were two. 
Eather should it resolve to multiply and increase 
its educational endowments so that the state could 
by means of them keep within its borders, those of 
its own men who showed special promise, and 
could at the same time attract the best from other 
parts of the land. 

But an educational institution confers good 
upon the community apart from the product which 
it turns out, in other ways than by maintenance 
of professorships. There is not a college in New 
York, however small and unimportant, which is 
supported by gifts from, the public, which does 
not perform a useful service as a propaganda for 
the highest interests of life. Necessity is laid 
upon it to interest men and women in these higher 
things in order that it may receive from them the 
means of livelihood. It becomes, therefore, a 
great missionary enterprise for awakening the 
public mind to a true conception of the importance 
and worth of education. 

180 



Is Not Applicable to Education 

No man can serve on the board of such an in- 
stitution without receiving indirect benefit thereby. 
It gives him a broader outlook on the affairs of 
life and so enlarges and enriches his soul that 
he is thenceforth a better and a bigger man than 
he would otherwise have been. The state uni- 
versities and the public school systems have been 
slow to realize and to acknowledge the debt which 
they owe to the private institutions for thus creat- 
ing and disseminating a knowledge and a faith in 
things educational. We may query, whether in the 
course of two or three generations if education 
were to become solely a matter for the state, to 
be supported by state appropriations, secured 
through manipulation of state legislatures, there 
would not be a decay of this faith and knowledge 
among the people at large. 

Thirdly, as to the argument in behalf of consoli- 
dation, on the ground that thereby there is greater 
specialization of function and a consequent de- 
mand for higher and better paid skill, I am ready 
to admit that the growth of great institutions cre- 
ates a place for great specialists, and a demand 
for thorough and minute scholarship in the vari- 
ous fields of knowledge. But it is equally true 
that the small college has created and maintains 
a demand for a type of teacher equally valuable 
and equally important to the state. We need the 
specialists, but we need also the teacher who is 
more man than scholar. It will be an unfortunate 
day for education if the time ever comes when 

181 



Why the Trust Idea 

scholarship counts more than character, in de- 
fining the qualifications for the position of teacher 
of the nation's youth. 

I have thus tried to set forth considerations 
which should oppose the growing tendency to re- 
gard the trust idea in education as unanswerable 
upon the grounds of economy, greater specializa- 
tion, and wider opportunity for the individual stu- 
dent. At the same time, we of the educational 
world may well profit by certain lessons of the 
trust. If we are to have diversity of educational 
enterprises they must be carried on not in the 
spirit of ruthless competition for selfish ends, but 
in a spirit of friendly cooperation, such as should 
be found among laborers for a great purpose, 
which is not to be my individual good or your in- 
dividual good, but the good of all. An applica- 
tion of the trust idea to education such as this, 
we cannot but heartily applaud ; but the other ap- 
plication, to reduce the number of plants, to cur- 
tail the number of men involved, to handle stu- 
dents in large masses instead of as individuals; 
to spend less on these higher things that we may 
spend more on the lusts of the flesh and the pride 
of life; such an application is one to be con- 
demned. Let those who have been bearing the 
burden in the support and maintenance of our col- 
leges, be not too eager to rid themselves of the 
load, or to turn the task over to some one else. 
Let us realize rather that, in founding and main- 
taining colleges, they have been engaging in a 
work which can only reflect honor upon the state. 

182 



Is Not Applicable to Education 

That they have been engaged in doing a thing 
which is good in itself and is profitable for all 
things. Let them not be solicitous for size. 
Let them be solicitous for quality. Let them 
ask themselves not for how little we can 
secure our teachers, but how attractive a field 
of labor can we make our foundations. Not how 
little can we do for our students and still retain 
their patronage, but how much can this philan- 
thropic enterprise give to those who come within 
its influence. If in such a spirit as this they will 
heartily prosecute their great undertakings, there 
will be no one so narrow as to deny them their 
proper place in the great world of education, and 
there will be no wise, intelligent citizen who will 
not favor multiplication rather than subtraction 
for such colleges in America. 



183 



DEFINING THE COLLEGE MAN 

IN coining to speak at Davidson College, I do 
not feel that I am coming entirely to a strange 
land, or to one with which Pennsylvania has no 
associations. One hundred and forty-two years 
ago, Lafayette rode from Carolina to Philadel- 
phia; a fatiguing journey of a month. Colonel 
William Davidson, a native Pennsylvanian, came 
from Pennsylvania to fight for freedom in the 
Carolinas. Lafayette College's most distin- 
guished professor, Francis A. March, was sum- 
moned to Easton from Virginia, and the first 
President of Lafayette, George Junkin, gave his 
daughter as the bride of that stalwart Presby- 
terian soldier, Stonewall Jackson. In the old days 
many Southern students journeyed to Easton as 
they did to Princeton and felt at home in colleges 
of our common Calvinism, and at my own inaug- 
uration four years ago, we were glad to adopt as 
an honorary son of Lafayette, a native of Char- 
lotte, and one who I doubt not was loved here in 
Davidson as he was throughout the country, even 
though head of a rival institution, Edward K. 
Graham, the only one of the twelve regional direc- 
tors of the Student Army Training Corps who 
paid the price of his patriotic service with his life, 



Commencement address at Davidson College, North Carolina, 
May, 1919. 

184 



Defining the College Man 

and to whose memory, I could not but pay a tri- 
bute of respect and devotion as I entered Ms birth 
place yesterday morning. As I read the history 
of the Revolutionary days and see how much pass- 
ing to and fro there was between Pennsylvania and 
the Carolinas in the days of horesback riding, I 
cannot but feel that in this day of aeroplanes and 
automobiles our educational relations should be 
closer, and our scholastic interchanges more fre- 
quent, and in this belief I have come to speak to 
you to-day. 

While this is my first view of the physical David- 
son, Davidson College is no stranger. I know it 
as a civil engineer knows a point on the other side 
of the mountain which he cannot see, by triangula- 
tion. I have looked at it from the angle of a 
Presbyterian college in Missouri, as well as from 
a Presbyterian college in Pennsylvania. The 
pastor of the college church in Missouri was a 
Davidson alumnus, and we ate at the same table 
for the better part of four years. In the stormy 
times of the S.A.T.C. days at Lafayette, two of 
our twenty officers were Davidson men. When I 
was in Missouri, I was a communicant of the 
Southern Church, and I knew Davidson as a lead- 
ing college of the denomination. I cannot but re- 
gret as president of Lafayette, the only college for 
men east of the Alleghenies legally connected with 
the Presbyterian Church, North, that an intangi- 
ble veil certainly not theological, and certainly not 
geographical, should deprive us of the close fel- 
lowship and cooperation of Davidson as fellow 

185 



Defining the College Man 

Presbyterians working in the common cause of 
Christian education. Many and varied, however, 
as have been the lines of relation which have as- 
sociated me with Davidson, the picture which has 
hitherto come most prominently to my mind when 
Davidson College is mentioned, is a picture of a 
man. The man is John F. Cannon of St. Louis. 
When in St. Louis week before last at the meet- 
ing of our Greneral Assembly, I found that great 
changes had occurred in the city during the six- 
teen years I had been away. The Grand Avenue 
Presbyterian Church had rebuilt itself a splendid 
new Grothic building in the western part of the city, 
and had changed its name, but not its pastor, and 
I was glad to greet again the man who had served 
them for thirty-one years with unswerving fidel- 
ity. I found him not quite as erect as the straight, 
tall North Carolinian pine I had known; his 
shoulders had become somewhat bowed with the 
weight of years and the woes of the war, but the 
same bright eye was there ; the same kindly cour- 
tesy ; the same ruminating intellect ; the same un- 
hasting, unwearying devotion to duty; the same 
singleness of purpose; and if I mistake not, one . 
who has known John F. Cannon well for twenty 
years has a pretty good idea of Davidson College. 

I have ventured to give my address this morn- 
ing the title, ''Defining the College Man," with 
the purpose of calling your attention to some modi- 
fications brought about by the war in the emphasis 
we place on various phases of this definition. 

The phrase which has been made familiar to all 
186 



Defining the College Man 

of us by the war and which we have learned to 
hear with general satisfaction is, "They attained 
their objective." Definiteness of aim is three- 
fourths of success and naming an objective gives a 
measure of achievement. If we know what point 
we wish to reach, we know when we have arrived. 
If we know what we want, we know when we get 
it, that we have the achievement to our credit. 
Geometry is one of the most delightful of all 
studies, because you can write at the bottom of 
each page, Q. E. D., and the page is complete. 
Even God himself, the eternal worker, is por- 
trayed as moving forward step by step toward 
definite objectives, and God said, "Let there be 
light," and there was light, and the evening and 
the morning were the first day. And God made 
the firmament, and the evening and the morning 
were the second day. Men and women who get 
the least satisfaction out of life, are the men and 
women who have no objectives, and who there- 
fore never attain. They may be going forward 
with the rest of the world's army; they may by 
force of circumstances even be doing their share 
of the fighting, but it is not purposeful activity, 
and unless they have in their mind some picture 
of a good day's work, some ideal by which they can 
measure the day's fighting at the end of the day, 
they lose the richest rewards life has to give. 

Graduation is an objective in the life of the 
college man. Most of you have looked forward 
to it through four long years. Vicissitudes of 
war have perhaps made it appear a vanishing 

187 



Defining the College Man 

vision, but to-day in spite of all the '*ifs" and 
*'buts," the "howevers" and ''neverthelesses,'* 
you have attained your objective. Nothing can 
alter or detract, minify or magnify that simple 
fact. I congratulate the Class of 1919 in that 
in this year of war, it can be said of them as of 
good soldiers, ''you have attained your objective." 
What is true of individuals is true also of insti- 
tutions and of nations. If the individual succeeds 
who has before him a definite objective, so too 
the institution will succeed which moves forward 
with conscious purpose toward definite aims and 
does not sit waiting Micawberwise for something 
to turn up. It is, I think, a just criticism which 
has been made against the American college of 
to-day, that it does not define clearly to itself the 
task which it undertakes, that it does not picture 
even in its dreams its typical product, that no 
two members of an American college faculty 
would agree if asked to name the young man who 
to their minds most perfectly portrayed the ideal 
product of the American college of Arts. Any- 
one who has sat with the college faculty trying to 
frame a curriculum in these days of expanding 
knowledge, or any student who has tried from the 
courses offered to select a course of study which 
satisfies him in all particulars, knows that there 
is no agreement among experts as to what the 
ideal American college graduate ought to know. 
Even a decade ago, the college professor could 
satisfy himself by saying vaguely, the aim of his 
college was to produce a cultivated lady or gentle- 



Defining the College Man 

man ready to enter a chosen calling or course of 
training with not only a certain amount of definite 
knowledge, but also with a degree of appreciation 
and taste, of power of mind and of sense of method 
such as would insure their growth into the best 
of which they were capable, and possibly into 
the best of their time or even of all time. A dec- 
ade ago, a college president could write, and 
Professor Fulton must often have been reminded 
of the phrase as he looked on at events these last 
months in Paris, * ' There is a program which will 
make the college man ready to lay his mind along- 
side the tasks of the world of educated men with 
some confidence that he can master them and can 
understand why and how they are to be performed, 
but what that program is or how that degree of 
appreciation and taste and power of mind are to be 
attained, no one seems prepared to tell us." The 
Professor of Mathematics cannot conceive of a 
man liberally educated who knows no trigono- 
metry. The Professor of Modern Languages, 
while perhaps willing to-day to surrender Ger- 
man, insists that it be replaced with Italian, Span- 
ish, or possibly Eussian. The Professors of 
Biology, Physics and Chemistry can prove be- 
yond the possibility of a doubt the existence of a 
large blind spot in any mental retina which sees 
the universe only in terms of cells, of molecules or 
of motion, and not in terms of all three, and so 
throughout the list. There was a time when the 
colleges tried to supply the elements which the 
society of the day rated as essential to culture, but 

189 



Defining the College Man 

there is a wider gap between the cultured man 
as recognized and applauded by the world of to- 
day and the product which the average college 
can guarantee. The knowledge and appreciation 
of art, music, and literature is perhaps the field 
in which the disparity is most clearly seen, but 
it is equally obvious if you test the familiarity 
of the college graduate with his world by ask- 
ing him to describe a modern printing press; to 
explain how cement is made, or even to master 
the intricacies of the McCormick reaper. So 
rapidly has scientific . knowledge expanded ; so 
fruitful has been the inventive American mind in 
the world of mechanics, that there has grown up a 
vast body of knowledge which has hardly yet got- 
ten into books and of a large part of which even 
the most learned men are ignorant. Certainly 
no man could be found who could meet the demand 
of the Wisconsin legislator, that all the books in 
the university library be read by a student before 
the state go to the expense of buying new ones. 
Where could any college president or professor 
be found who could pass all the examinations 
offered in his own institution! The world of 
learning to-day is a very different world from 
the world which existed in the good old days 
of Quadrivium and Trivium, or even in the days 
when the College of Arts was conceived and 
established. 

The truth of the matter is that the college is not 
a factory with a standardized product. We could 
not if we would attain the definiteness and uni- 

190 



Defining the College Man 

formity among college graduates that we can se- 
cure for Uneeda biscuit or Domino sugar, but we 
can at least like an army define our objectives in 
terms of direction and distance and coordinate our 
efforts to secure the ultimate purposes of the cam- 
paign. Even before the war the need of a redefi- 
nition of the college product was strongly felt. 
The revolutions in college thought and traditions 
due to the war, the new tasks demanded of college 
men in war time, the re-rating of the qualities of 
college men when confronted with new tasks such 
as have faced them the last two years, all these 
have caused heart-searchings and re-investi'ga- 
tions of established creeds in the college world, 
and we have emerged from the war, ready to listen 
to new attempts at definitions. Like Whittier's 
theologian, scattering flowers on ancient faiths, of 
newer creeds which claim a place in truth's do- 
main, we ask the title deeds. 

In some ways the war itself has helped us to our 
new definitions, and the first and greatest service 
of the war in this direction is the restoration of 
our faith in the indivisible, unmultipliable, human 
personality as the unit of all our calculations. 
Until the war came, we were finding ourselves 
served fairly well by a psychology without a soul, 
by a philosophy which explained the will in terms 
of idea rather than the idea in terms of will, by 
a philosophy which explained emotion in terms of 
heart, and liver and bile, rather than heart and 
liver and bile in terms of wish and desire and reso- 
lution. The habit had grown in academic circles 

,191 



Defining the College Man 

especially of standing aside to watch the stream 
of consciousness flow by with no clear sense of 
responsibility for the good, the bad, the true and 
false which the stream might bring. The slang 
of the moment was not, what do you think your- 
self, but, I want to get your reaction to this, — an 
appeal not to a living choosing personality, but to 
a bundle of habits. Upon this kind of an aca- 
demic world, war burst in its fury. Great de- 
cisions on which hung the issues of life and death 
confronted men. The path of duty and the path 
of self-interest diverged. Habits of peace time 
were of httle assistance in precipitating reactions 
for war. The world of idea was replaced by a 
world of will. Eeasonableness ceased to be the 
last word, devotion and sacrifice crowded it to one 
side. Americans who had never felt the heavy 
hand of Government, suddenly found themselves 
under restraint, not free to come and go as they 
would, or to refer their acts to their conscience as 
a court of last resort. We grew accustomed to 
reading of the will to conquest, of the will to 
victory. The Emperor of Germany and the 
President of the United States as well, talked of 
what I want. A whole nation spoke in the impera- 
tive, they shall not pass, and we suddenly awoke 
to the realization that our grandfathers who 
thought of men as will and passion were perhaps 
nearer right than our fathers who thought of men 
as conscious machines. In the first place, I take it 
that in our redefinition of the ideal college man, 
we shall lay more emphasis in the age immediately 

192 



Defining the College Man 

before us upon qualities of will, upon creative 
imagination, upon all those qualities which we sum 
up under the word gallant, a man who sees plainly 
his objective, and who is not likely to be deterred 
or turned aside from reaching it. The war is said 
to have been a war of engineers, and it was the 
engineers who sensed the need of redefinition in 
this direction even before the war began. The 
careful investigation of engineering education and 
of the work of educated engineers had brought the 
engineering world to the conclusion that steps 
must be taken to cultivate in the engineering 
student, imagination, initiative, courage and 
knowledge of men. The tendency of training in 
modem science is to make man think of himself 
as the subject of inexorable law. Trained in sci- 
entific method, taught for years that inaccuracy is 
the great sin, encouraged to deny his hopes and de- 
sires, striving to rid himself of old preconceptions 
and personal preferences and to wait humbly at 
his microscope, at his test tube, at his telescope 
for the reality that may be revealed, there had 
grown up gradually the worship of the God of 
things as they are and a paralysis of that function 
of the human will which can utter what Carlyle 
calls the everlasting ''yea," the determination to 
have a part in the creation of reality. It was only 
the newness of scientific discovery, however, which 
gave it this binding power. The inexorableness 
of day and night, the sun rising and the sun set- 
ting, of life and death, have proved no fetter to 
the free spirit of man and new scientific discovery 

193 



Defining the College Man 

growing more familiar and better understood is 
accepted as a matter of course, and the spirit is 
free again to proceed on its adventurous quest. 
As the philosophers have pointed out, we should 
expect Mohammedanism and Calvinism with their 
predestination and determinism to produce a fatal- 
istic race without daring, while history shows just 
the opposite. The man who believes most firmly 
in the supreme divine will seems freest in the use 
of the human will. Alfred Noyes, perhaps better 
than any modem poet, has sensed this problem of 
the relation; of scientific knowledge and ideals to 
the human will and has shown how, rightly con- 
ceived, the concept of universal law hberates 
rather than controls the human mind. ' ' Only the 
soul that plays its rhythmic part in that grand 
measure of the tides and sun terrestrial and celes- 
tial until it soars into the supreme melodies of 
Heaven, only that soul climbing the splendid round 
of law from height to height may walk with God, 
shape its own sphere from chaos, conquer death, 
lay hold on life and liberty and sing. ' ' The Hercu- 
lean tasks of the great war came just in time to 
show that there were ends big enough and great 
enough for humanity to relegate knowledge and 
science to their rightful places as servants rather 
than masters, of willing, serving, sacrificing, tri- 
umphant man. 

The second help to our redefinition given by the 
war comes from the important part played in 
modern warfare by proper timing of our advance. 
If the first lesson is to define your objective, the 

194 



Defining the College Man 

second is to go over the top at the right time and 
proceed neither too fast nor too slow. Any one 
who has looked at a moving picture of modem war- 
fare must have been struck by the slow movement 
of troops advancing under fire. In this war the 
artillery goes first and the troops follow the bar- 
rage, not the individual attack first, supported by 
the heavy guns. The present war could be fought 
only by disciplined soldiers, soldiers who could 
conform their actions to a clock. The undisci- 
plined soldier was for the most part futile. I take 
it that from the analogy of the barrage we shall 
draw other arguments for restraining the impa- 
tience of youth and making them submit to the 
trying delays and postponements of action which 
must be patiently sustained if there is to be ade- 
quate preparation. You men who have stuck to 
college through the exciting times of the last four 
years, must know something of the mind of the 
men who had to spend long hours of deadly wait- 
ing in the trenches for one hour of exciting pur- 
suit over the top. As the world has looked on 
at the great object lesson of the war and has seen 
the thousands of men employed to contribute to 
the success at the critical moment of one fighting 
man, as they have realized how vastly intricate is 
the organization which underlies the modern 
fighter or the aviator with his machine gun, they 
will be less impatient with colleges in the battle for 
truth, less ready to suggest shortcuts, more ready 
to understand how the knowledge of truth and the 
creation of beauty, the adaptation of new knowl- 

195 



Defining the College Man 

edge to the happiness of men cannot be the imme- 
diate work of all, even a democracy, but is the 
finest fruit and flower of the intricate machine of 
civilization, just as the machinery of the nations in 
the great war existed for the sake of the fighting 
man, and the fighting man for the sake of the 
nations. 

We have learned more than one lesson about 
time in its application to education from the war, 
however. We have learned not only that you must 
take time for adequate preparation before you ad- 
vance to your objective; not only that you must 
start at the right time and not go too fast or too 
slow for the barrage, but we have learned a great 
deal also about synchronization; about all 
branches of the service doing things at the same 
time. Aviators, artillery, men in the trenches, 
engineers, wire-cutters, railroad men, all must act 
and act at the same time in a great advance. It 
has been a telephone war, a war that could not 
have been fought without wireless and telephones, 
and we may expect to see education profit by the 
lesson. We may expect to find more coordination 
in the new curriculum. We may expect to find 
the professor of biology concerned to know when 
the students come to him at 11 o^clock, what they 
have been talking about in the history room at 
10 o'clock, and we may even look forward to the 
establishment of that much needed telephone cen- 
tral in education, a chair of things in general, so 
that the college graduate of to-morrow will not 
only know history in the history room and biology 

196 



Defining the College Man 

in the biology room and Latin in the Latin room, 
but may so coordinate his knowledge that he may 
have some sort of a world point of view of science 
such as the old chair of natural philosophy was 
able to give and some world point of view of man 
and his progress such as the old text books on the 
history of civilization purported to present. 

And the third object lesson of the war which 
may help in our definition of the college man is the 
helplessness of man without proper equipment. 
This war was the war of the machine gun. As 
President Lowell of Harvard has said from the 
educator's point of view, the difficulty with war- 
fare as a subject of instruction is that you have 
to teach a man to use a weapon which is not yet 
invented. Nobody apparently had guessed the 
possibilities of machine gun warfare, but we 
learned before we got through that one man at a 
machine gun, whether he was a German, an Eng- 
lishman, or an American, could stay a regiment. 
It was a great object lesson for college men on the 
value of equipment. On the other hand we learned 
that the most impregnable defense was made of 
plain dirt. Dirt trenches dug deep enough were 
better than the steel forts of Belgium. Dirt 
trenches lined with cement were more wholesome 
places to live, but not as safe as dirt trenches 
without the concrete. The machine gun is an in- 
tricate piece of mechanism, and the United States 
even after it had gone to war, thought it necessary 
to spend some months deciding what kind of a 
machine gun to manufacture. It could not be 

197 



Defining the College Man 

picked up when the soldier needed it on a moment's 
notice. On the other hand, the defensive weapon 
of the dirt trench was something the ordinary 
soldier could provide himself with on the shortest 
notice. Age is inchned to over-rate the value of 
tools; youth is inclined to under-rate their value. 
Some colleges neglect the provision of apparatus 
which might be of the greatest assistance to the 
students. Others go to the other extreme and pro- 
vide the student with so much apparatus and with 
so many labor saving devices, that when the 
student is thrown into the practical world, he is 
helpless. The greatest discoveries in science are 
not always made in the best appointed labora- 
tories. In determining the value of equipment to 
the college man, we should not be too ready to 
judge it by its intricacy. A hole in the mud may 
be a very useful weapon, an intricate machine gun 
may also be a useful weapon, but neither the sim- 
plicity and uncouthness of the one, the intricacy 
and novelty of the other, should be the determining 
factor in determining what arms to lay upon the 
college David as he goes forth to meet the defiance 
of error and superstition. But time is passing, 
and I must hurry to my conclusion. 

Two other aspects of education have received 
emphasis from our war experience. They are so 
obvious, that I will speak but briefly of each. 
First is the importance of more adequate and sys- 
tematic physical training. I think the consensus 
of opinion is, that the college boy who went to a 
training camp, or who received military training 

198 



Defining the College Man 

at the college was almost invariably a better 
physical animal than the college boy of peace 
times. The slouch was gone, indifference was 
gone sluggishness was gone, superfluous fat was 
gone, reaction followed far more quickly on 
stimuli. If the mind held fewer ideas, the body 
at least responded more promptly to the few the 
mind had. I do not think that the war persuaded 
the more thoughtful college professors that mili- 
tary training was necessarily the solution of the 
problem of how to provide the student with a 
serviceable physical machine. The truth of the 
matter is, that the physical machine created by 
military training was not a very serviceable 
machine for study. The physique which looked so 
superb was in the class room likely to be drowsy 
and obtuse. The habits formed under military 
training and the appetites created in the bodily 
cells, as soon as the student reverted from the oc- 
cupation of soldier to the occupation of student, 
gave the student a less serviceable physical 
machine for the purposes of study than he had had 
before. The war to my mind did not solve the 
problem of physical education for the student, but 
it did undoubtedly persuade us all that it was one 
of the problems to which American education must 
promptly address itself, and I am convinced that 
no definition of the ideal college man will be ac- 
ceptable in the new era which does not include a 
prepossessing physique and carriage, one which 
shall be serviceable to the student and expressive 

199 



Defining the College Man 

at the same time of that grace and mastery of 
mind over body which it must be an important 
function of a true education to create. 

Finally, our definition of the ideal college man 
will be affected by the lesson taught by the war, 
that emotion matters. If you talk to an army man 
he would not call it emotion, but morale. By 
morale I understand not only what a man thinks, 
but how he feels about what he thinks. This as- 
pect of the mental life of men has been sadly 
neglected by our American colleges the last few 
years. In fact the scientist has been trying to 
persuade us that we should have no emotions as 
students, unless possibly the consuming fire of de- 
votion to truth. It is because of this low rating 
of emotion that religion and worship have been 
receiving such scant recognition in the college cur- 
ricula of the last twenty-five years. As our psy- 
chology has been weak in its analysis of will, so 
it has been weak also in its analysis and knowledge 
of emotion. I think our more thoughtful college 
professors have come out of the war with the con- 
viction that in some way we must see to it that our 
college men preserve and develop throughout 
their college course, the capacity of feeling deeply 
and of admiring whole-heartedly and profoundly. 
We owe it to our Greek letter fraternities that they 
at least in the barren years just passing have 
stressed the value of human emotion as manifested 
in ties of friendly fellowship. We owe it to our 
Y. M. C. A. 's that they have found a place for the 

200 



Defining the College Man 

cultivation of emotion in religion through expres- 
sion. We owe it to our athletics, however little 
they have contributed to the physical development 
of the students in the bleachers, that at least they 
have furnished an opportunity for the develop- 
ment of their emotional qualities through expres- 
sion. However weak William James's psychol- 
ogy of emotion is, it was sound in this, that it 
taught that if a man went through the physical 
expression of anger, he could gradually arouse in 
himself the emotion of anger. If he went through 
the physical expression of joy, he could gradually 
arouse in himself the emotion of joy. We have 
then this much of a key to the solution of the prob- 
lem of how we may cultivate and enrich the emo- 
tional content of a man^s life. 

Lord Fisher said a very wise thing in Parlia- 
ment the other day in discussing the proposition 
to create a commission to survey the universities 
of Great Britain. Universities, he said, are not 
the outgrowth of commissions, but of a great 
moral purpose. So of the individual student's 
emotional life, if we would see it develop properly, 
we must preserve in the curriculum and in the 
heart of the individual man a great moral pur- 
pose. Because of our common Presbyterianism, 
I may say to you of Davidson, as I say to the men 
of Lafayette, that you cannot have complete edu- 
cation and you cannot define your ideal college 
man with religion left out. Call it what you 
please, every man rates things according to 
some scale of value, and the thing he places at the 

201 



Defining the College Man 

top, the thing to which he gives the right of way, 
he worships as his God. Not only what our men 
think about, not only what they know, but how they 
feel about what they think, is an essential question 
for the education of to-morrow. 

With the objective defined, with patient prepa- 
ration and advance well timed, with tools valued 
only for their efficiency, with a body ready to func- 
tion gracefully and effectively for the work in 
hand, and with the soul aflame with a divine fire, 
the college man will go forth into the new era and 
furnish the wise, efficient leadership which de- 
mocracy so greatly needs. Gradually our loved 
America is ridding itself of the tyranny of things. 
We think of the state as an organization not of 
property, but of persons. Labor has shortened 
its hours of labor and says to the colleges, we have 
leisure now for making men, give us the pattern 
by which to work. The ideals of our colleges 
matter as never before in the world of to-day. I 
know you all, whether as alumni or students, teach- 
ers or benefactors, will share in helping to ade- 
quately redefine the ideal college man of America. 



202 



T 



THE COLLEGE MAN AND FREEDOM 
HEEE is an old liymn beginning, 



"When I can read my title clear 

To mansions in the skies, 
I bid farewell to every fear, 

And wipe my weeping eyes." 

This college opening is notable in that for the 
first time the university welcomes its students at 
University Heights to a campus the title to which 
is absolutely free from every incumbrance. At 
the close of these exercises I shall hand to the 
president of the Student Organization the univer- 
sity's bond for $500,000, which has outlived both 
its signers — William A. Wheelock and Israel C. 
Pierson — for complete annihilation. Through the 
generosity of the late John S. Kennedy, the uni- 
versity was enabled to pay the mortgage on the 
University Heights property in August, and to- 
day dedicates anew this campus to the permanent 
service of higher education, in the hope that it may 
forever hereafter be held sacred for this purpose 
and never again be jeopardized by debt. 

This final payment on the University Heights 
property comes as a most fitting and appropriate 

Address at the opening of the College of Arts and Pure Science 
and School of Applied Science of New York University, Univer- 
sity Heights, September, 1910. 

203 



The College Man and Freedom 

final act in the administration of the chancellor 
whose term of office terminates on this his seven- 
tieth birthday. If there is an appropriateness in 
the final payment on the property being made by 
the money from Mr. Kennedy because the doors 
of his house were the first to be opened for the 
fostering of the uptown project, it is also a con- 
summation more gratifying than the fates often 
accord that the retiring chancellor should have 
the satisfaction of leaving arduous work begun 
twenty years ago so perfected. You students of 
University Heights, who, hke myself, have known 
him most intimately these last years, know how 
this home of the college — true child of his own 
spirit — held a foremost place in his affections and 
absorbed the deepest emotions of his heart. It 
has been given to few men to leave so marked an 
impression of his personality on forty acres of 
New York land. This campus will remain through 
generations an enduring monument to his sagacity 
and unsparing devotion. Beginning with the 
staking of his whole bank account on the original 
option, the felling of the forest and the grading 
of the streets, the securing of a railroad station, 
post office and telegraph station, the moving and 
removing of the temporary buildings and the 
athletic field, when the munificence of Miss Gould 
made possible a larger campus than was originally 
planned, through the erection of this Library 
Building and the Hall of Fame and finally to the 
amendment of the city map to protect the trees on 
the Schwab Estate and render more beautiful the 

204 



The College Man and Freedom 

southern approach — every detail has had his per- 
sonal attention and every foot of soil bears his 
footprint. It comes to you students of the College 
and School of Applied Science as a city university 
campus without rival in natural beauty. Nowhere 
within the city limits could the site be duplicated 
to-day. Tracts of forty acres protected from di- 
vision by streets by the city charter are hard to 
find. Forty acres on the top of a hill with a view 
of two rivers and the Sound and yet level enough 
to be adapted to the requirements of a college 
without great expense, is a unique possession. 
New York is so immense that the present genera- 
tion has not yet come to realize what a cause for 
municipal pride it has in this university campus. 
Perhaps with the increased use of airships this 
green oasis will more often attract the attention of 
New Yorkers than its neighbor Woodlawn, in the 
number of its quarter-million-dollar buildings. 
The property is, as I have said, to-day free from 
every outside incumbrance. More than that, the 
entire campus is held by the university free from 
any conditions except the condition that some 
portion of the Schwab Estate shall always be de- 
voted to woman 's working and living. It bears no 
donor's name and, as the chancellor pointed out 
in his commencement address of a year ago, ''The 
University is not under contract to do anything 
whatsoever which the ideal university of America 
ought not to undertake. No political interest, no 
business trust, no economic theory, no denomina- 
tional creed, no race, no territory, not even New 

205 



The College Man and Freedom 

York City itself, can make any legal claim upon 
it." In its freedom from obligation, the campus 
is a type of the American college student. To-day 
you men of the entering class step into the free- 
dom of your manhood. Legally, you are not of 
age and still subject to your parents' control and, 
under the old theory of college government, ''more 
honored now in the breach than in the observ- 
ance," this legal and moral right of control is 
from this day delegated by your parents to the 
college faculty. Indeed, the American system of 
education differs chiefly from that of Germany in 
providing a transitional institution in which the 
strict control of the secondary school shall give 
place gradually to the complete freedom of the uni- 
versity, in which, indeed, according to the genius 
of our whole social system, men shall learn to 
govern themselves. There are in America still 
two systems of educating man for self-government 
and each has its strong adherents. The one sys- 
tem, that takes as its motto the old maxim that a 
man learns to rule by learning to obey, is the sys- 
tem which finds its best exemplification and 
strongest argument in our national academies at 
West Point and Annapolis, and the general senti- 
ment of the country seems to be that the system is 
justified by its fruits. The other system is the 
true child of democracy. It is one of the glories 
of the world's great universities that they tend to 
be democratic within themselves whatever may be 
their attitude toward the world at large. The 
theory of this system of training men for self- 

206 



The College Man and Freedom 

government is to minimize restraint from with- 
out the student body, whether exercised by a 
parent, a faculty, a dean, or other disciplinary 
officer, and to leave the individual free to follow 
the promptings of his own spirit subject to the 
restraints imposed upon him by the presence of 
other men of like age and passions with himself, 
also free to follow the promptings of their spirits. 
The result of this system has been the growth of a 
democratic form of government within the student 
body itself and, as happened in the pure democ- 
racy of New England town meetings, this demo- 
cratic form of student government has ventured 
to extremes in regulation of private conduct which 
no external authority would have attempted. You 
gentlemen of the entering class will find here at 
University Heights two governments. There is 
the government of the faculty, which is set forth 
in the printed rules, a copy of which each of you 
should have received, in which you will find not 
only the legal and theoretical government of the 
college, but also a very real government clothed 
with sufficient power to execute its statutes should 
you make the mistake, which some students have 
made, of supposing that faculty government was 
like the tonsils or the vermiform appendix — a 
heritage from a former life with no immediate 
function, but you will discover also that in the free 
democracy allowed and fostered by this faculty 
government, there has grown up a subsidiary gov- 
ernment with its own laws and executives. In this 
institution, the government is known as the Stu- 

207 



The College Man and Freedom 

dent Organization. It is not, however, a condition 
peculiar to this institution. Throughout the 
United States we find this disposition of the stu- 
dent body, given originally individual freedom, 
to organize themselves to render e:ffective the 
wishes of the stronger leaders or it may be of the 
majority. Beginning with the common bond of 
interest in athletics, holding mass meetings for 
training in cheering and in chorus singing, these 
organizations have little by httle enlarged their 
scope until they exercise an important control in 
all the internal affairs of college life. I believe 
in the fostering and encouragement of such an 
organization and that steps should be taken by the 
faculties to keep in touch with its activities and 
to utilize the agency as the most effective means 
of student control. The existence of this form of 
government, however, will bring to the entering 
student new and serious questions, 
'j As I have said, you have entered to-day upon a 

/ life which has been freed from many of the old 
restrictions. There will be a time schedule to be 
followed and tasks to be performed and appropri- 
ate penalties will follow the failure to observe 
these restrictions, but there is no such exactness 
or narrowness to these requirements as confront 
the average young man leaving his home or leav- 
ing the high school to go into business. Of all 
\ groups in our modern civilization, college students 
are the one too free from restriction, is the ver- 
dict which is gradually formulating itself as we 
examine the product of the last twenty-five years, 

208 



The College Man and Freedom 

and as a result there has been a general tightening 
of screws in all institutions the last year or so, 
but so far as I know, there has been no wide dis- 
position to substitute for the system of self-se- 
lected activity the system of routine strictly con- 
trolled from without, such as exists at West Point. 
As we continue to believe in democracy with all 
its failures as a more worthy form of government 
for free men than monarchy, so we continue to 
believe that sooner or later the life of every edu- 
cated man must be directed from within and that 
freedom, therefore, is essential for that most im- 
portant of all college lessons, the lesson of self- 
direction. The Faculty, therefore, welcome you 
to-day to a life which, so far as the faculty are 
concerned, has been made freer from outside re- 
striction than you will find elsewhere in life. 
Probably this accords with your view of college 
life and you have come to college expecting to find 
and to enjoy to the full this freedom. You will 
perhaps, therefore, be somewhat surprised early 
in your course to find your freedom restricted by 
men, who, like yourselves, looked forward to the 
pleasures of the freedom of college life. You will 
find college customs and college sentiment con- 
solidated in a strong student organization. You 
will find that this organization, deriving its powers 
from the consent of the governed, enforces rules 
which seem to the outsider to interfere to an un- 
warranted extent with the rights of the individual. 
Indeed, there will doubtless be some of you, who, 
not on any grounds of political economy or be- 

209 



The College Man and Freedom 

cause of any theory which you may hold regard- 
ing the rights and duties of a democracy, but 
purely for personal reasons, will regard these 
rules as iniquitous tyranny. You will begin then 
the consideration of a problem which, in its vari- 
ous aspects, will confront and puzzle you through 
life or at least as long as your intellect remains 
active and until you begin to go without inquiry 
in a rut of convention. That question deals with 
the relative spheres of individual and social ac- 
tivity. Of the things which I do, of the thoughts 
which I think, how much of my life shall I live by 
myself and in my own way and what things shall 
I do and what thoughts shall I think and how much 
of my life shall I live after a fashion which repre- 
sents the resulting compromise of many minds 
and many wills ? 

College life as now organized tends to develop 
the social side of the individualistic student prob- 
ably more than it tends to make a strong person- 
ality of the student of social impulses. There is 
a criticism which seems to hold equally against 
democracy in the state and democracy in the stu- 
dent body — that democracy does not want excep- 
tional men, does not create them and, when possi- 
ble, destroys them. The birth of genius is a 
thing with which a university has little to do. The 
university does its part if it affords genius its 
opportunity, and to this end equality of opportun- 
ity must be forever the first principle of college 
democracy. If, however, college democracy, as 
manifested in its student organization, defeats the 

210 



The College Man and Freedom 

ends of freedom by exacting of all a similar rou- 
tine, it will be doing all it can to minimize the 
number of great men. Thus, for example, while 
the requirement of a similar hat for all freshmen 
may not interfere with the development of any 
freshman's peculiar genius, I am not sure that to 
make universal a rule requiring freshmen to con- 
tribute a certain amount of personal service to 
the welfare of an athletic team may not interfere 
with the proper development of some freshman 
whose genius lies in another direction. Just as 
we are still seeking in vain any exact definition of 
what the liberally educated man should know, so 
we are without any exact definition of the social 
life and activities in which all educated men 
should participate. We have come to a time in. 
our civic and national life when men have found 
their personal activities and their most cherished 
desires set at naught by powers outside them- 
selves too strong for the individual to wrestle with 
successfully. Many of the strongest believers in 
freedom, therefore, have joined hands to restrict 
the freedom of others and have limited their own 
freedom in so doing. We shall see in the next 
few years great clashes between those who believe 
in as little government as possible and those who 
believe in nothing but government. 

As a preparation for the solution of these 
questions, I ask you, especially the juniors and 
seniors, to give thoughtful consideration to the 
problems of a democracy in our college community. 
I was impressed by the fact at the last commenoe- 

2U 



The College Man and Freedom 

ment that whereas in former days college grad- 
uates in their commencement orations solved the 
problems of the nation, at the last commencement 
all the orations discussed the problems of the 
college itself. It is, I believe, a wholesome sign 
when reform begins thus at home. I ask you to 
consider how far government by the crowd can go 
without becoming tyranny. I ask you to consider 
what are the minimum rights of the individual 
which it is expedient for the community that the 
majority should hold sacred. I ask you freshmen 
to consider when submission to organized society 
is a virtue and when insurgency becomes incum- 
bent. I ask you to test here in your college de- 
mocracy your theories of political party regularity 
and insurgency. I ask you to view the college 
community as it would be viewed by a member of 
some other college democracy and ask yourself 
what it requires to make it notable and give it 
high rank among communities. Will it rank high- 
est if all its men are ahke and do things in a con- 
ventional way or will it rank higher if it finds 
room for unusual men; if it encourages individ- 
uality and variety ; if it finds room for the hermit 
as well as the social leader; if it suspends judg- 
ment on the ultimate contribution of the mystic 
as compared with that of the athlete ; the man who 
makes a perfect recitation with that of the man 
who is so interested reading in the library that 
he forgets the recitation altogether. I ask you to 
make impossible the charge often laid at the door 
of democracies of commonplaceness. College de- 

212 



The College Man and Freedom 

mocracy will always be quick to detect uniqueness ' 
and will find satisfaction in labeling it with a nick- 
name, but when you have given it a name, let it 
go at that. 

When I entered this college twenty years ago, / 
1 was fortunate enough to enjoy the instruction 
of a very able teacher of English. One of his / 
favorite dictums has been : ''When a man enters / 
college he thinks in words. After a time he may ' 
be able to think in clauses or sentences and the 
exceptional man may even attain to thinking in 
paragraphs." I trust that with this enlargement, 
which goes on from time to time during the | 
college course, in your mental capacities, the / 
critics of the college notwithstanding, there will 
come a broader toleration for different kinds of 
men and that your imaginations will be enlarged 
so that you will be able to conceive places for many 
kinds in a college democracy and will so shape 
your student government that it may be free from 
all tyranny toward those who differ from the aver- 
age man. 



213 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF TO-DAY 

ANEW era is beginning, has already begun, in 
the life of our American colleges. It is 
hard to generalize, for a country with such 
diverse conditions as our own, because standards 
of wealth and standards of culture and ideals of 
life are very different, in Montana, for example, 
and in Massachusetts. And yet the intellectual 
life of our nation is more homogeneous than a 
stranger would suppose. Inquiries for the publi- 
cations of a graduate school are as likely to 
come from Oregon and Minnesota as from Con- 
necticut or New Jersey. I find the same maga- 
zines and books on sale in Cripple Creek, Colo- 
rado, as on Fifth Avenue, and within the same 
week. The newsboys cry the same issue of the 
same weekly on the same Thursday in Seattle as 
in New York or Savannah. Newspaper editorials 
and contributions supplied to chains of news- 
papers appear the same day in New York, Chicago, 
Denver and San Francisco. Indeed the middle 
sections of our country are so anxious to be 
abreast of the times that they begin to show rest- 
lessness under the present standard time system, 
which puts Cleveland an hour behind New York, 
and want not to keep up with the sun but to get 



Address before the University Club of Reading, Pa., 1915. 

214 



The American College of To-day 

ahead of it. I find college presidents and college 
professors discussing the same problems in Los 
Angeles, Salt Lake City and Providence. Na- 
tional organizations, like the Carnegie Founda- 
tion and the College Entrance Examination Board, 
adopt standards and definitions which they apply 
to the whole country. The Presbyterian College 
Board, of which I am president, works with col- 
leges in thirty-five of the states, from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific, and from the Lakes to the Grulf, 
and we find that the differences in social and eco- 
nomic status between sections of our country is 
no greater than that between large sections of the 
population in New York City, while in intellectual 
aspirations and ideals they are far more homo- 
geneous. With due allowance, therefore, for 
local adaptations, for the local twist of dialect 
and atmosphere, we are justified in speaking of 
national eras in education, of country-wide trends 
in educational thought. 

The age just passing has been an age of enor- 
mous expansion in our American economic, social 
and intellectual worlds. Economically, we think 
to-day in millions of dollars, when a generation 
ago we thought in thousands. The people used 
to think the man with a million or two stood in 
the king row. Now they know he is only a pawn 
in the great game of finance. Socially, we think 
internationally. A generation ago, the foreign 
tourist returned as an adventurer from strange 
lands. Last summer we discovered Europe to be 
the summer resort of over a hundred thousand 

215 



The American College of To-day 

Americans. It does not seem strange any more 
that an American professor should run over to 
China to advise the government, as a physician 
might be called in consultation from Philadelphia 
to the Hot Springs ; or that the American Ambas- 
sador resident in Berlin should be a candidate at 
the same time for the post of United States sen- 
ator from New York. At the opera I sat next to 
a young American girl who has won prizes for art 
in Paris, taught for some years cannibals and 
dwarfs in Africa, contributed to the ''Atlantic 
Monthly, ' ' and who is equally at home in the prim- 
itive African jungle, in the luxury of the Metro- 
politan, or in the ethereal realms of the " Atlantic 
Monthly." A college professor acts as United 
States Minister at the Hague, a university presi- 
dent spends a sabbatical year as our Government 
representative in Greece, another tours the world 
in the interests of world peace, while another 
spends a summer vacation establishing cordial 
relations with Chili, Peru, and the Argentine Ee- 
public. We are exploring just as fast and as far 
intellectually as we are geographically. Our edu- 
cational horizon is no less sweeping than the moral 
horizon defined in the commandment as ''anything 
in heaven above, in the earth beneath, or in the 
waters under the earth." It is only necessary to 
read a list of the activities of the Carnegie Insti- 
tution at Washington to see how our interest in 
the physical world has expanded. Astronomy is 
old, old as David and the wise men of the East, 
but it was not until I spent a night in that modern 

216 



The American College of To-day 

monastery on top of Mount Wilson in California 
last spring, that I realized how Science was call- 
ing accumulated science to its aid, just as labor 
calls accumulated labor to its aid in the form of 
capital, to help it in its work; so that whereas a 
generation ago astronomy was a comparatively 
simple affair of man and his telescope and his 
mathematics, now it is a matter not only of man 
increased to a staff, recruited from more than one 
country and working in relays, of telescopes of 
various kinds, of reflecting mirrors a hundred 
inches in diameter, mounted on steel frames weigh- 
ing tons multiplied by tons, dragged for miles up 
specially constructed roads ; but the eye that sees 
is no longer the human eye, but the eye of the 
camera plate, the eye that reads is the eye of the 
microscope, and the interpreter of the dream is the 
magician in the physics laboratory or in the chem- 
ical laboratory, miles below down on the plain. 
Thus equipped the astronomer not only sees the 
present but forecasts the future. Not content with 
studying Being, the world as it is, science, like the 
old Greek philosophies, wants to know Becoming 
also, wants to see things grow, wants to observe 
generation succeeding generation, and to ascertain 
what is the purpose in all this ceaseless begetting, 
and whether it can be influenced by the will of 
man. And so the scientist sits glued to his micro- 
scope at Wood's Hole, Cold Spring, and many a 
college laboratory ; and the young instructor chats 
with his wife, if he is so fortunate or unfortunate 
as to have one, over the supper table, of frogs, 

217 



The American College of To-day 

star-fish and earthworms, while she makes family 
pets of his dogs and guinea-pigs. 

Or, turning from the physical field to the activi- 
ties of man, we find that scientific spirit, going 
into the dusty archives at Washington, dragging 
out long-forgotten papers, listing them, and mak- 
ing card catalogues and bibliographies; so that 
the historian and statistician may speak, not by 
hearsay, not even by the book, but by the very 
document itself. We find a paper like ' ' The New 
York Times" spending thousands of dollars on 
cable tolls, and giving up columns of space, in 
order that any man may possess for a penny 
knowledge which no chancellery of Europe could 
buy at any price a month before. 

We find the scientific spirit turning to the prac- 
tical affairs of life, to the field which has hitherto 
been known as the practical world, in distinction 
to the world of learning, the world of action, as 
distinguished from the world of thought ; and writ- 
ing down in books just how to make a yard of 
cloth, how to sell it when made, and how to enter 
up in accounts the results of the transaction. 
Business, curiously enough, is for the first time 
beginning to be found in books ; we are inventing 
terms and classifications, thus enabling us to think 
abstractly of its phenomena, and to enunciate gen- 
eral principles concerning it, and to make it a part 
of our whole scheme of knowledge and relate it 
to our ethics, our politics, our economics, as Aris- 
totle tried to do, in what seems to us a rather 
naive way, at the acme of Greek learning. 

218 



The American College of To-day 

In the field of government, again, the thinker is 
at work. When I began teaching Municipal Gov- 
ernment, you could count on your fingers all the 
books in English worth reading on the subject. 
Now, hardly a week passes without the issue of a 
new one, many of them scientific and scholarly. 

Even that most complex of sciences, housekeep- 
ing, is being put into a book, and probably is as 
little able to recognize herself as the rural char- 
acter who found herself in a novel. We have 
books on sewing, and in spite of all the stitches 
taken since the world began, it is hard to put sew- 
ing into a book. Mrs. Jessup, Director of Sew- 
ing in the New York City Schools, once told me 
that while many teachers could sew, hardly one 
could make a diagram to illustrate any special 
kind of stitch. 

And so, through all the world of practical life, 
where we have had ability to do things but have 
not known, like the good cook, how we do them, 
man the thinking animal, having a little leisure 
here in America because of the natural wealth of 
a new country, and the blessing of international 
peace, and a good deal of that native Yankee curi- 
osity which ''wants to know," and whose favorite 
expletive is ''Do tell," is taking up one by one the 
various activities of men and women, is describ- 
ing, analyzing, naming, putting into books. Now 
all this expansion in our national life, economic, 
social and intellectual, has necessarily found ex- 
pression in the life and organization of our col- 
leges. In fact, they are responsible for a good 

219 



The American College of To-day 

deal of it, and like the boy who touches off the 
firecracker, not surprised that it has happened, 
only surprised that the noise and reverberations 
are so much greater than they had supposed. 

The old-time curriculum, Greek, Latin and 
Mathematics, which in my own college days had 
only begun to show signs of cracking, has in the 
process been blown to pieces; or if the fuse has 
burned out, has left an institution which is about 
as useful and promising as a firecracker without 
a fuse. 

What Physics began. Chemistry and Biology 
completed. English once firmly planted in the 
fort has helped in her allies. History, Politics, 
Sociology ; while Psychology has assumed the role 
of mediator, between the insurgent sciences on 
the one side and the completed philosophy of man, 
life and civilization, which long held sway. War, 
however, is in itself never profitable. Times of 
transition are times of opportunity; they are 
rarely times of satisfaction. Ships without rud- 
ders don't make very good headway. It is what 
we believe, as Carlyle points out, not what we 
doubt, that gives us life. When machinery comes 
in, the hand weaver finds it hard to adapt him- 
self to new conditions. When the automobile re- 
places the horse, some coachmen learn to be chauf- 
feurs, others starve. 

And so the expansion which has been taking 
place in the college world, while tremendously in- 
teresting and stimulating, has brought along with 
it a great deal of waste and wreckage, and we 

220 



The American College of To-day 

are anxious to get back to more settled times. 
The result is, that here and there you will find 
the curriculum builder again at work, trying to 
gather up the experience of the generation of 
college boys just passing, for the benefit of the 
generations to come; and if we have any faith 
in knowledge at all, we must believe that it is 
just this which we ought to do, and that it can be 
done. We wonder why American youth does not 
have a deeper reverence for learning. There are 
many answers to the question. But surely if the 
college professor who spends his whole life teach- 
ing boys, who watches them after graduation, and 
teaches their sons after them, cannot generalize to 
the extent of naming at least some of the things 
which the prospective preacher, lawyer, physician 
ought to study, there is good reason for the Amer- 
ican inclination to rank native wit above the 
knowledge of the expert. I believe, therefore, that 
the curriculum builders have taken up an import- 
ant task, and that we should follow and, so far as 
possible, participate in the experiments which are 
being made in that direction. 

The past era, however, has been a time of ex- 
pansion in other aspects of college life, besides 
that of the content of courses. Student bodies 
have grown so that the number which fills the 
small college to-day would have satisfied the uni- 
versity a generation ago. Buildings have in- 
creased sevenfold. Provision for the student has 
kept pace with the demand for conveniences in 
the modern home. Only last June I spent a night 

221 



The American College of To-day 

in the dormitories at Princeton, and had an op- 
portunity to compare the old dormitories with 
their double-deck beds, water no nearer the fourth 
floor than the basement, with the luxury of the 
new Graduate College, with its suites of bedroom, 
sitting-room, entry and private bath. 

College presidents, college trustees, college 
alumni are to-day, however, confronted with a 
clear-cut alternative, which is this : shall we seek 
success in terms of quantity or of quality; shall 
we seek popular applause or discriminating ap- 
proval? To maintain a college of liberal arts and 
pure science or a technological school of high 
grade is expensive, relatively far more expensive 
than in the last generation. We know now pretty 
accurately just how expensive a good college is. 
For the first time in the history of colleges, a com- 
mittee has sat down with a pencil, and put down 
in black and white the minimum cost at which a 
college can be maintained at all. They have put 
down also what the cost would be were the best 
of everything combined in one institution, and 
they have supported these estimates by figures 
from colleges actually in operation. The report 
was presented for the first time at the meeting 
held in Chicago last month, to organize the Asso- 
ciation of American Colleges. We are safe to 
say, therefore, that a college of the highest grade 
requires three million dollars ; a million dollars in 
grounds, building and equipment, and two million 
dollars in productive endowment. Technological 
schools are still more expensive. The great in- 

222 



The American College of To-day 

flux of students which began sweeping into the col- 
leges twenty-five years ago, because of the great 
expansion in wealth and the social prestige given 
by college education is somewhat receding, or 
being diverted to more specialized schools. Pros- 
pective students of medicine twenty-five years ago 
who had six years to give to study beyond the 
high school, could give four to the college and two 
to the medical school, because that was all the 
medical school demanded. Now' the medical school 
demands four or five years, and there is a disposi- 
tion, therefore, to leave the college at the end of 
the second year. To meet the increasing pres- 
sure, and make it possible for the professional 
man to begin at an earlier age, all sorts of short 
cuts have been devised. At the same time, col- 
leges have been multiplied. The States have 
opened their treasuries, and college education has 
been made free. High schools have improved 
their curricula and strengthened their courses, so 
that the boy learns in high school much of what 
he formerly learned in college ; and as the high 
schools have pushed up from below, the universi- 
ties have let down their nets from above, and en- 
couraged the student to take a combined course 
in the university college and university profes- 
sional school. 

The college then, feeling the tide sweeping out 
rather than rolling in, asks : what must we do to 
be saved; what must we do for success? The 
temptation is to meet the free tuition of state 
institutions and the competition of other colleges, 

223 



The American College of To-day 

by waiving tuition charges, by unduly multiply- 
ing scholarships, in order that numbers may be 
maintained at any cost. Another temptation is 
to offer cheaper lines of goods, or as the news- 
papers say — to give the public what they demand, 
meaning what will command the largest circula- 
tion. Summer schools without entrance examina- 
tions, short courses for teachers, courses in com- 
merce and finance are multiplied because they in- 
crease the number of students, because the public 
wants them, and because they come nearer paying 
their way; while Greek, if maintained at all, is 
maintained as an expensive luxury for a select few, 
and Latin shrivels from a four-year subject to a 
two-year one. The alternative which confronts 
the colleges is not one, however, which is peculiar 
to education. It is one which confronts the busi- 
ness-man and the literary man quite as truly as 
the educational administrator. An established, 
business which finds\its clientele diminishing in a 
given location and with a given class of goods 
may do one of several things. It may resolve to 
remain in the same location, but to cheapen its 
grade of goods ; and to use the prestige of the past 
to attract a new and larger patronage of a lower 
grade. It may be successful in this, if it adver- 
tises wisely, buys closely, and sells on very narrow 
margins of profit. Or it may go on, according to 
the precedents of the past century, selling high- 
grade goods to a constantly decreasing number of 
patrons, while its trade dmndles and finally dis- 
appears. Or it may ask itself — what and where 

224 



The American College of To-day 

do the people buy who formerly bought here, what 
is it they want, and what do they pay for it? 
And if it finds them preferring a new location, 
more convenient methods, costlier goods, more 
luxurious shops, along with a willingness to pay 
a higher price for all these things, the business 
man, if daring and progressive enough, may enter 
the new field, increase his capital, incur larger ex- 
pense, and succeed or fail, according to the sagac- 
ity and diligence which guide the venture. 

So with a newspaper, when confronted with the 
question of remaining a three cent or two cent 
paper, or becoming a one cent paper, and seeking 
a larger circulation at the expense of selectness 
and dignity. 

So with the author, when confronted with the 
alternative of writing a novel which will have an 
enormous circulation at once, or a novel which will 
take three or four times as long to write and will 
take three or four times as long to win its way. 

In these dilemmas there is no practical rule to 
guide, no maxim of experience. It may be pos- 
sible to have a paper for one cent, quite as good 
in quality as the three cent paper, and with the 
advantage of larger circulation besides. It may 
be that the novel or the play written to meet the 
popular appeal will have so much of eternal hu- 
manity in it, that it will live and become a classic. 
It may prove that the course instituted by the 
college as a pot-boiler will reveal an unexpected 
need in the community, and contribute something 
valuable to human progress. But because the 

225 



The American College of To-day 

temptation is to seek immediate success, rather 
than to endure the privations and obscurity which 
is the lot of most idealists, college presidents, col- 
lege alumni, college trustees will do well to be on 
their guard against the alternative which prom- 
ises the quickest returns. We must believe that 
in a moral universe, the good and the profitable 
eventually coincide, that the laws of morality jus- 
tify themselves in the experience of the race, if not 
in the experience of the individual ; and therefore, 
in the life of an institution, what is good and right 
will also prove in the long run profitable. We do 
not ask, therefore, that in making plans for edu- 
cation you ignore or stifle the instinct for success ; 
but only that you do not deal in too small units, 
or insist that the harvest come over night. 

There is, I have said, no maxim or precept which 
will decide any such alternative off-hand. There 
is, however, one principle which we should never 
lose sight of in such dilemmas, and that principle 
may be called sincerity. In our veneration for 
institutions, whether the institution be a form of 
church government, a college or a college cur- 
riculum, a political party or a national constitu- 
tion, a particular shape or price of newspaper, or 
an accepted style of architecture, we are apt to 
lose sight of the fact that these were created orig- 
inally as practical means for attaining definite 
ends; and were good not in and for themselves, 
but because they accomplished something which 
men wanted, in a pleasant and efficient way. Vin- 
dicated by the experience of generations, hallowed 

226 



The American College of To-day 

as the source of untold benefactions, we have come 
to esteem them for themselves, and to regard as 
profane the man who would apply practical tests 
to that which we have come to regard as inher- 
ently sacred. The study of history is the surest 
correction of this attitude, when carried to im- 
proper extremes. If we trace the birth of institu- 
tions and find how they are the outgrowth and sur- 
vival of many attempts made by men — quite as 
much puzzled and perplexed by their current prob- 
lems as we are to-day — to find the proper means 
to reach the end they had in view; and if we will 
try to imbibe their spirit rather than worship their 
work, we shall approach the problems of the col- 
lege and the curriculum in a new spirit of sincer- 
ity, and with not less reverence for the ideal. 

The creed expressed by Jesus, when he declared 
that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man 
for the Sabbath, is characteristic of the thought 
of our own day. Institutions are made for man, 
not man for institutions. The school exists for 
the sake of the child, not the child for the sake 
of the school. If we seem to find a contradiction 
of this creed in the present sacrifice of a million 
men in Germany to the idea of the state, in the 
sacrifice of a whole nation like Belgium to a con- 
cept such as national dignity and integrity, it is 
only temporary and apparent; and when society 
sums up the values of the present conflict, its unit 
of measurement will not be this or that nation, 
but man the individual, including all his larger 
relations as a political animal. Unless the Bel- 

227 



The American College of To-day 

gian of to-morrow is or has something which the 
citizen of Luxembourg is not or has not, Belgium 
will have suffered in vain. There is, therefore, 
but one sure method of measuring results, of test- 
ing current practice or new experiment in the edu- 
cational world, and that is by the pupil. College 
faculties, torn this way and that by conflicting 
interests, alumni reminiscent of their own college 
days, trustees interested in deficits and cost units, 
college presidents eager to make this year better 
than the last, and to justify their membership in 
the great brotherhood of optimists, may promul- 
gate theories, may decree hall-marks of value, may 
dress up this or that subject in fine array, hoping 
thus to determine its station; but the problem of 
what makes a good college education will never 
be settled that way. 

Nothing is more illuminating to a student of 
educational administration than to see how 
quickly the point of view of a professor, with 
relation to the curriculum, changes the minute the 
professor has a son in college, and he looks at the 
curriculum with his son's eyes. We regard this 
as personal partiality, but after all, enlarged and 
generalized, it is the only true method. If we 
would know the excellencies or defects of our pres- 
ent system, we must go with the freshman to the 
Eegistrar's office and enroll, with him we must 
pay our term bills and establish ourselves in the 
dormitory; with him we must face the question 
of athletics and of fraternity life ; and with him, in 
spirit if not in body, we must map out the hours 

228 



The American College of To-day 

of the day and the days of the year, and go the 
round of the class-rooms. If it be true that ''ex- 
cept ye become as little children, ye shall not see 
the Kingdom of Heaven," it is also true that 
the college professor or the college president that 
dwells in a world remote from the world of the 
student, and has little or no knowledge of how that 
elaborate scherre of compromise known as the 
college curriculum works out in the case of an 
individual freshman, has not even started on the 
road to the kingdom of ideal education. 

Nature they say is careless of the individual, 
careless even of the type. I, for one, do not be- 
lieve it. I take the other view of the universe; 
that not a sparrow falls to the ground without our 
Father's notice, and that men are of much greater 
value than they. And fortified with this faith in 
the unique significance of each man, I return again 
and again to the task of so shaping and modifying 
our institutions, that in the credit and debit ac- 
count between the individual and organized so- 
ciety, in the college and in the larger world with- 
out, the balance of profit shall remain with the 
individual. 

I wish the time would permit me to take you 
with me, step by step, through the ideal college as 
I picture it. But perhaps it would be a waste of 
time, after all; for the Lord has so arranged the 
world, that all the good things are not found in 
any one institution, nor all the desirable attributes 
in any one man or woman, as the college presi- 
dent discovers every time he seeks a professor, 

229 



The American College of To-day 

and as you, perhaps, discovered when you sought 
a wife. Besides, you have each of you, as college 
men, probably in a more or less conscious way, 
pictured an ideal college, each for himself, espe- 
cially if you have a son. The only thing is, that if 
you have a son, you probably have much more 
definite ideas as to what you do not want him to 
spend time on at college, than as to what subjects 
you do want him to study ; and it becomes the task 
of the college president and of the college faculty, 
therefore, to substitute for old dislikes and re- 
sentments, for disproved theories and hypotheses 
that have not worked, new ideals and hypotheses 
which shall at least have the merit of not contra- 
dicting your experience. 

James Bryce has said that two salient character- 
istics of the mass of the American people are — 
"A fondness for bold and striking effects ; a pref- 
erence for larger generalizations and theories 
which have an ail* of completeness." And second, 
— "An inadequate perception of the difference be- 
tween first-rate work in a quiet style, and mere 
flatness." And these characteristics of the mass 
of our people have militated against quality in our 
colleges. There is growing up, however, in a 
small circle, a more intelligent comprehension of 
what the college really is, and what a difference 
there may be between a good college and a poor 
college. 

Hence thinking men favor quality as against 
quantity. They favor thoroughness as against 
speed. They favor teachers who are good teach- 

230 



The American College of To-day 

ers, rather than good advertisers, or publishers, or 
publicists. One of the weakest points in college 
administration has been that we have had no fixed 
criteria by which to measure good teaching. If 
we want good teaching, we must find some way of 
knowing it when we have it, and of giving it its 
due meed of fame, and proper financial reward. 
Yet we would not if we could remove the college 
teacher from participation in the life of his times. 
President Meiklejohn has said: "I believe it to be 
the function of the teacher to stand before his 
pupils and before the community at large as the 
intellectual leader of his time. If he is not able 
to take this leadership, he is not worthy of his 
calling. If the leadership is taken from him and 
given to others, then the very foundations of the 
scheme of instruction are shaken." And yet, in 
this day of popular interest in all things, of pub- 
licity agents, and newspaper reputation, how shall 
the college teacher come to be a recognized leader 
in his community, if he sticks to his last ? Recog- 
nized by his associates he may be, recognized in 
other universities and in other countries if he is 
an author; but now as ever it is true that the 
prophet (and the great college leader is a prophet) 
is likely to be a man without honor in his own 
country and in his own age. 

In spite of what Bryce has characterized as the 
average American '^s love of generalization and ap- 
parent completeness, the college of the New Era 
must be content to be one-sided. It must be con- 
tent to specialize. It must aim to be the best of 

231 



The American College of To-day 

its kind in at least one field; to be known as giv- 
ing the best course in the country in English or 
Chemistry, or History, as the case may be. Even 
one great man confers distinction on an entire 
faculty, and all his contemporaries shine with re- 
flected luster, while the fame of an Agassiz, a 
Francis Wayland, a Francis March outlasts his 
own generation, and confers on his institution the 
good-will of generations as yet unborn. 

To honor the great teacher will put a premium 
too on all good teaching. But we shall need also 
more radical reforms to alter the present point of 
view. We have come to have too much German 
irresponsibility in our college faculties, too many 
teachers who not only do not regard themselves 
as responsible for what the student learns or does 
not learn, but who expressly maintain that it is 
not their affair, that it is the function of the 
scholar to know and to speak what they know, 
that it is the business of the man with ears to 
hear, or not to hear at his own cost. 

This has resulted in a false antagonism between 
the professor and the average student. They lack 
a common aim. If some means can be devised for 
the whole faculty to test what students learn 
under any given instructor, that common interest 
will be supplied, the success of the student will 
be also the success of the teacher, and his failure 
will reflect discredit upon the teacher as well as 
upon himself. Professor and student will then 
feel that they are cooperating for a common end, 
and the college professor will feel the same con- 

232 



The American College of To-day 

cern for the success of his students as the pro- 
fessional school does for the record of its grad- 
uates who take state examinations for the prac- 
tice of law or of medicine. 

The faculty must enlarge its point of view also 
with regard to all those activities which go to 
make up a healthy and normal life for the young 
human animal. The function of sleep American 
colleges have long recognized alongside of study, 
and immortalized it in the name of dormitory. 
Athletics have been tolerated or encouraged, but 
as solely a student affair, not as a faculty affair 
in any positive and constructive way, until re- 
cently. If the college cannot find scholars who 
are interested in sports and physical manhood as 
well as in intellectual culture, then it must employ 
specialists who are interested in sports and ath- 
letics from the educational side, and make them a 
constituent part of the college faculty. So with 
the social life and the religious life of the students, 
the faculty must know the whole man, must plan 
for the whole man ; not in any too intimate or per- 
sonal way, not in any way that will deprive the 
student of the freedom of self-direction, but 
neither in the laissez faire spirit of the individual- 
ism of the past century, which in the larger com- 
munity of the state, as well as in the smaller com- 
munity of the college, felt it wise to throw all the 
responsibility on the individual. To Plato it 
seemed worth while to discuss athletic exercises 
at considerable length, as a part of the training 
of both men and women in his ideal state. And 

233 



The American College of To-day 

thanks to the increasing knowledge biology has 
given us of the laws of growth, of the relations 
of physical and mental conditions, and to the 
saner theology of to-day, which does not regard 
the flesh as inherently evil, but prays *'Thy 
Kingdom come" on earth, in healthy human be- 
ings, the way is open for college faculties to take 
up the athletic training of youth in as scientific 
a spirit as that in which they approach their in- 
tellectual training. 

We have to reconcile the mass of the American 
people to the maintenance of an intellectual at- 
mosphere in our colleges, at the cost of other 
things. Some colleges at least must resolve to be 
more intellectual than the average society around 
them. Their interest in things intellectual must 
exceed the interest in things intellectual of even 
a bowlful of their own alumni. The contents of 
books or lectures must bubble out in campus con- 
versations, at least with as great frequency as 
comments on automobiles. But this will never 
come until the colleges secure faculties clever 
enough to show the relation of the knowledge they 
are giving to life. The answers to problems are 
never interesting, except to those who ask the 
questions or hear them asked. 

The college which is to survive must regain 
more of seriousness of purpose, so that the train- 
ing it gives will be real discipline. Instead of 
planning short cuts, we shall recognize that knowl- 
edge is growing by such leaps and bounds that 
the m.an who would master merely the rudiments 

234 



The American College of To-day \ 

will have but little leisure in four full crowded, , ] 
happy years. 

And so in the new era of our colleges, big and | 

little, to quote MacMechan, *' season will follow^ S 

season, the years slip away, and the college which , \ 

is not a building or a staff of teachers, or a body | 

of students, or all combined, but a spiritual ideal, " I 

which you thinking men must help to mold, "will | 

strike its roots deeper into all hearts concerned \ 
with it." 



235 



BUSINESS SIDE OF COLLEGE ADMINIS- 
TRATION 

THERE was a time when the college presi- 
dent, like the chnrch pastor, was supposed 
to be free from worldly cares and avocations, but 
that time has long since passed — if it ever existed. 
As a matter of fact, the head of a college, like the 
head of a church, is always apt to share the finan- 
cial responsibility of his concern. It is said that 
the noted divine who resigned this year the presi- 
dency of a theological seminary to accept a pro- 
fessorship of biblical literature, resigned for the 
reason that his trustees had not been able to carry 
out their agreement to relieve him of responsibil- 
ity for the finances of the institution, although 
this was one of the conditions understood and 
agreed to when he took the position. 

Even in the days when college presidents were 
preferably clergymen, they were still business 
men — and many of them very excellent business 
men. This is not to be wondered at when we 
realize that Mr. Rockefeller has selected as his 
shrewd business agents in the philanthropic world 
— clergymen. 

But, while business has always been intermin- 
gled with teaching and administration, it is corn- 
Address before the Rotary Club, Easton, Pa., 1916. 

236 



Business Side of College Administration 

paratively recently that business has begun to out- 
weigh the teaching and administrative functions. 
To such proportions indeed has the business side 
of college administration grown, that a new ten- 
dency has set in which has manifested itself in the 
appointment in many institutions of a second ad- 
ministrative officer, with the title of Provost, Con- 
troller, Business Manager, Secretary, Vice Presi- 
dent, or what-not, for the purpose of relieving 
presidents as far as possible of routine business 
administration. This is a tendency which is 
likely to go very much farther than it has yet 
gone, and we need not yet despair of rescuing the 
college presidency from the present position of 
"man-of-all-work" and general ''chore boy" to 
which it has fallen. 

The college, as a business, is distinguished from 
other businesses by two important facts : 

(1) A college president, like the Hebrews in 
Egypt, is expected not only to make his bricks, 
but to find his own straw for his bricks, or, failing 
to find it, make his product hold together as best 
he can. 

(2) The more successful the college president is 
in his business, the greater tends to be his deficit 
at the end of the year. Increasing the output 
does not reduce production costs, nor is the price 
of the article particularly affected by the quality 
of the product. No under-graduate college which 
deals in liberal culture can to-day, in America, ask 
or secure what the course costs the college. No 
college of liberal arts in America, so far as I 

237 



Business Side of College Administration 

know, charges its students more than $200.00 a 
year, exclusive of room and board, and the major- 
ity of them do not charge more than $100.00 a 
year, exclusive of room and board. 

The Carnegie Foundation published this sum- 
mer a report showing the increase in college tui- 
tion fees during the last ten years. In general 
these charges have increased about one-fifth in 
that time. Outside of the technical schools the 
highest charge is the new fee of Harvard, $200. 

The most notable increases were : 
Amherst from $110 in 1909 to $190 in 1915 
Bowdoin from $75 in 1909 to $100 in 1915 
University of Wisconsin from $30 in 1909 to $100 

1915 
"Wesleyan from $108 in 1906 to $190 in 1915 
Oberlin from $75 in 1910 to $100 in 1915 
Columbia from $150 in 1913 to $198 in 1915 
Union College from $75 in 1910 to $90 in 1915 

Since the report the fee at Princeton has been 
increased from $160 to $175, and at Harvard from 
$150, the fee charged since 1869, to $200. Yale 
has adopted a system by which the charges are 
based upon a charge of $40 for overhead expenses 
per student per year, plus $8 per hour of instruc- 
tion per year, the university stating that this is 
approximately the actual cost of the teaching. 

At Lafayette, a student pays approximately 
$160 a year outside of technical courses, where he 
pays $210. The cost to the college per student is 
approximately $275 per year, allowing nothing for 
interest on plant. If this were added, the col- 

238 



Business Side of College Administration 

lege would have to secure an additional one hun- 
dred dollars per student, or approximately 
$375.00, to come out even. What the student now 
pays, is, roughly speaking, the teachers' salaries, 
leaving the heating, lighting and cleaning of build- 
ings, care of grounds, repairs, insurance, admin- 
istration, advertising and printing to be provided 
from some other source. 

It is conceivable if the state were doing nothing 
for liberal education that there might have 
sprung up here and there, a self-supporting col- 
lege where the charge for tuition would be $500.00 
per student, and the president might, therefore, 
make both ends meet, or even find himself in the 
position of the ordinary business man — the larger 
his trade, the greater his profits. In other words, 
the college might be in the same position as the 
preparatory schools that are conducted on a pro- 
prietary basis, yet it is to be noted that even the 
best of our preparatory schools are inclined to 
fashion themselves after the colleges rather than 
the colleges after the preparatory schools in this 
matter of money-making. Several of the best 
girls' schools have recently sought incorporation, 
in order that they might not only secure perman- 
ence, but might also appeal to their graduates for 
financial support. So long as the state stands 
ready to offer a liberal education free for boys 
and girls, either by maintaining a state college, 
as in Pennsylvania, or by offering competitive 
scholarships, good at any institution approved by 

239 



Business Side of College Administration 

the state, as in New York, it is not likely that a 
college can ever be made profitable from the busi- 
ness point of view. 

The college president, therefore, so far as he is 
a business man, is a business man in the same 
sense in which the manager of a hospital is a busi- 
ness man. He is conducting the business side of 
philanthropy, not the business side of productive 
business. The fuller he keeps his beds with pa- 
tients, the greater will be his deficit at the end of 
the year. 

There is, however, a strictly business side to 
philanthropy. Experts have studied the cost per 
bed at various hospitals, for construction and 
maintenance, so that one well-informed on the sub- 
ject can tell in a moment whether a given hospital 
is costing more or less than it should. So, the 
experts are beginning to > make studies of college 
buildings. Yale, for example, can tell not only 
what the cost of each dormitory is per student, 
but also what the annual cost of upkeep is per 
student, and what the relation is between first 
cost and cost of annual upkeep. 

This is a side of business administration in the 
colleges which has not yet received sufficient at- 
tention. We know in general that in the long run, 
the cheapest is not likely to be the cheapest to 
maintain. On the other hand, we do not know 
that the most expensive costs the least in the long 
run, and as yet no one has given us the scientific 
information which will enable us to say, for ex- 

240 



Business Side of College Administration 

ample, what kind of a flooring, or what kind of 
a chair is the cheapest in the long run for a col- 
lege. 

There was a time when the instruction given by 
the college was determined entirely on scholastic 
or theoretical grounds. This is no longer the 
case, especially in our largest institutions. Nowa- 
days, the college president is expected to have 
some financial standard by which he may deter- 
mine such things as how small a class may be and 
not be an extravagance. 

The college president to-day is expected to talk 
as glibly of overhead charges and per capita 
costs, as the efficiency expert, and is supposed to 
be able to measure the productive capacity of the 
professors by multiplying the number of students 
that a professor can teach efficiently at one time 
by the number of hours a week the professor's 
physical strength will permit him to teach. 

As yet the college president has not been as 
much bothered in his business by trades-union 
rules as the business man, but the same tendencies 
begin to manifest themselves in the college world. 
There is a disposition to standardize among the 
members of the faculty, to fix twelve or fifteen 
hours a week as the standard number of lectures 
to be given, and to see that all members of the 
faculty are treated the same in this respect. 
There is a tendency to standardize the number of 
students in a class and to see that every class con- 
sists of twenty or twenty-five, irrespective of the 
nature of the subject. The result of these tenden- 

241 



Business Side of College Administration 

cies is further to standardize the professors' pay 
because it is easy to see if the number of hours 
of class room work is fixed, and the pay of the 
professors is substantially the amount paid by 
the student in college fees, that mathematics will 
determine the professor's salary. Thus, for ex- 
ample, if a student pays at the rate of $10.00 an 
hour for a course one hour a week running 
through the college year, and the number of stu- 
dents in each class is limited to twenty, it is evi- 
dent that the professor's compensation per hour 
per year will be twenty times ten, or two hundred 
dollars. And if he gives twelve hours a week per 
year his compensation will be twelve times $200.00, 
or $2400.00. 

This tendency toward trade union standardiza- 
tion works in college business as in other trades, 
obviously to the disadvantage of the superior 
man. There are men who can teach 40 students 
as successfully as some other man can teach 20. 
At the same time, there are exceptional men 
who can lecture profitably to 200 students at one 
time, and where the tendency toward standardiza- 
tion prevails this superior ability cannot be util- 
ized, nor can the superior man secure the supe- 
rior rewards which are likely to keep him in the 
teaching business. 

From the administrative point of view, it is 
desirable, therefore, to avoid too much standard- 
ization and to introduce, at least, the distinctions 
recognized in the civil service of various grades. 
"With such arrangements, it should be possible to 

242 



Business Side of College Administration 

pay the exceptional man who can teach 200 stu- 
dents profitably, perhaps not ten times the com- 
pensation paid to the man who can teach 20, al- 
though that would not be too great a differentia- 
tion in reward to promote the best interests of the 
teaching profession, but at least five times as 
much, which would give him instead of a salary 
of $2400.00 a salary of $12,000.00. In the same 
way, there is the same objection to piece work du 
the part of college professors that is found with 
trade unions. There has grown up mth us the 
theory borrowed from Germany that teachers in 
institutions of higher education are not responsi- 
ble for the results of their teaching. That is, if 
I am a professor of history, and I teach one hun- 
dred freshmen and sixty of the class do not learn 
enough to pass the examination at the end of the 
term, the responsibility must be supposed to rest 
with the students, not with the professor. 

College administrators, from the business point 
of view, have devised two methods of correcting 
this tendency, but neither of them is as yet very 
widely used. As a result of extended studies, it 
has been found possible to say that in any given 
group of men approximately 5 per cent, may be 
expected to grade "A," 20 per cent. ''B," 40 per 
cent. ''C," 20 per cent. '*D," and accordingly a 
curve can be drawn which illustrates this fact. 
The modern president accordingly when the re- 
turns of examinations are filed can make up a 
record showing what the proportionate number of 
grades of each kind, given by each professor is, 

243 



Business Side of College Administration 

and from this establish the curve which, on com- 
parison with the normal curve already estab- 
lished, will indicate whether too many men are 
receiving ''A," too many men ''E" or "F" in 
the courses of that particular professor, and if 
there appears to be a wide divergence from the 
normal curve, he can make inquiry to ascertain 
whether it is the marking or the teaching which is 
at fault. You may recall the college boys ' rhyme 
quoted by President Foster: 

"There was a professor named Bray 
Who forgot the reflection on Bray ; 

When in two of his classes 

He gave out few passes 
And frightened good students away. ' ' 

Another device is to have the examination given 
by a joint board or by some one other than the in- 
structor, so that the examination becomes not 
only a test of the student's knowledge, but a test 
also of the teacher's ability to impart knowledge. 
These are some instances of business methods in 
modern college administration. Others will sug- 
gest themselves to all of you, investigations, such 
as those conducted by the Carnegie Foundation 
with reference to the use made of class rooms, 
the study of laboratory methods by the Carnegie 
Foundation, etc., are examples which I might 
name. 

At Lafayette last year Professor Lyle and Pro- 
fessor Fitch prepared a report showing the num- 
ber of chairs in each class room, the number of 

244 



Business Side of College Administration 

cubic feet to each student, the number of square 
feet of window glass, the number of square feet 
of black board, and the number of hours each 
room was in use. 

Various attempts have been made to measure 
the more intangible products of the college life. 
Professor Kunkel at Lafayette is now conducting 
an investigation along the lines of an investiga- 
tion conducted at Harvard to determine whether 
there is any relation between high grades in col- 
lege and success in life. 

The various engineering societies in connection 
with the Carnegie Foundation are trying to dis- 
cover whether a curriculum can be devised which 
will promote individual initiative, inventiveness, 
thoroughness, reliability and those qualities of 
character which we either ascribe to inheritance 
or to moral training outside the school. 

It is said that our colleges to-day have no clear 
conception of the kind of man whom they wish 
to produce, and therefore, no standard by which 
to judge their product, that you must first know 
what you want to do before you can go to work 
to do it. There is a good deal of truth in this 
criticism. We have been passing through an age 
of experimentation — the sudden growth and de- 
velopment of modern science overwhelmed the old 
curriculum, in which every student could cover 
all the branches of knowledge, and in which every 
professor felt that his branch was the most im- 
portant. For a time there was a consensus of 
opinion that certain branches were essential and 

245 



Business Side of College Administration 

that of other branches one was as good as another. 
As the number of subjects clamoring for recogni- 
tion grew, the only way to make room for all was 
to throw down the bars and make it a free field 
with no favor. This led to what was known as 
the Free Elective System. The responsibility 
which no faculty was willing to assume was thijs 
thrown upon the student, and he must decide for 
himself what subjects to take and what subjects 
he could safely ignore. No two professors would 
advise a student the same way regarding his 
course, and it followed naturally that there was 
no picture, common to all, of the ideal college 
graduate. The geologist knew what a good 
geologist was, and the chemist a chemist; the 
professor of German, a good linguist, and so on. 
At the same time, American society lost its co- 
herence and become too broad and extensive a 
thing to have any recognized leadership, social, 
financial or intellectual. There was nobody to 
state authoritatively what constituted a man of 
culture. The arts and graces particularly prized 
by certain sections of society, as for example, 
knowledge of art, knowledge of music, ability to 
speak French and Italian correctly and to dance 
well, were the branches for the most part ignored 
by the college of culture. On the other side, the 
college boy himself set up a new ideal of culture, 
which further divorced the actual product of the 
college from the ideals of refinement of the Victor- 
ian age which thought that the gentleman should 
stand up straight, keep his hands out of his 

246 



Business Side of College Administration 

pockets, brush his hair smoothly and wear incon- 
spicuous clothes. 

The college of America, however, is not alone 
in not knowing just what it wants. It is charac- 
teristic of the foreign policy of the American 
people and of their domestic policy as well. The 
truth of the matter being that so many different 
elements and races have been introduced into our 
civilization that there are all kinds of cross-cur- 
rents and there are as many different wants and 
ideals as there are different kinds of people 
among us. 

The most hopeful sign looking toward the solu- 
tion of the question is that here and there institu- 
tions are beginning to show signs of being content 
with having an idea of their own, even though it 
may not be shared by other institutions. They 
begin to see what the good business man has long 
seen — that there are great advantages in having 
a trade-mark, even though your goods may be 
practically the same as those sold in the shop 
across the street. Domino sugar may be no 
better than sugar out of the barrel, but at least 
the man buying it feels that he has a certain as- 
surance as to what he may expect. There was a 
time when oat meal was oat meal to the whole 
country, but now oat meal is Homsby Oats to 
one, and Quakers Oats to another, and so on down 
the list. So with education — until the present, 
college courses have been college courses with a 
great many people in general, but from now on 
we are likely to have greater differentiation. 

247 



Business Side of College Administration 

The American does not know the difference be- 
tween a Balliol man at Oxford and a Christ 
Church man, but to an Englishman there is as 
much difference as between a lawyer and a doctor. 

Amherst College has tried to introduce in Amer- 
ica the distinctive trade-mark idea for education, 
so that hereafter an Amherst man shall be known 
as a classical student, but as a man can graduate 
at Amherst without Greek, the idea does not make 
very rapid progress. 

There may be no money in the trade-mark idea 
in American education, but to my mind it is the 
only road to distinction in a democracy and the 
only way of escape from a paralyzing sameness 
of mediocrity. 

Besides these business problems, which are 
business problems for the college president to 
solve, there are other business problems which be- 
long to the manager of a large institution or 
great estate. There are the business problems 
relating to physical plant. The president of La- 
fayette, for example, is concerned as well as the 
director of Highways of the State over the ques- 
tion of what is the cheapest and most durable 
roadway for automobile traffic, or like the Park 
Commissioner over what will kill the elm beetle 
or protect his chestnut trees. He is supposed to 
be something of an architect and builder. He has 
an interest in all building materials; he is sup- 
posed to know what is the best brand of white 
lead, Atlantic or Dutch Boy; whether two 100 W. 
or one 200 W. Mazdas is the more economical 

248 



Business Side of College Administration 

light. He is supposed to know as well as any 
housewife in Easton what will take cement dust 
and acid fumes off window glass. He must be 
familiar with the price of coal, and know whether 
Lehigh is worth the difference in price. He is 
supposed to be familiar with the market rates and 
wages of laborers, gardeners, scrub women, car- 
penters, firemen, engineers, painters, tinsmiths, 
night watchmen, etc., etc. He is supposed to keep 
an eye on the investments of the college and to 
learn that the first rule of wealth is how to buy 
when things are cheap and to sell when they are 
dear. He is supposed even to have the valuable 
qualities of a good credit man and to be able to tell 
by looking at a student how long and how much he 
is to be trusted with credit for his college charges, 
and finally he must know something of what a re- 
cent writer of the '* Saturday Evening Post'^ de- 
scribed as the ''Fine Art of Hiring and Firing." 
Or perhaps, the college president is not supposed 
to fire any one in these days of professors ' unions. 
Perhaps we ought to say in the gentle art of 
dividing $5,000 available for salary increases any 
one year among the twenty appHcants, and to 
their mutual satisfaction. 

President Eliot says that the most important 
work the college president has to do is to discover 
and secure good professors, and he adds, never 
appoint a professor until you have seen his wife. 
President Hyde of Bowdoin says that he con- 
siders he has earned his year's salary when he 
has found three good men for his faculty. 

249 



Business Side of College Administration 

College presidents are expected^ too, to do a 
good deal of traveling. They belong, indeed, to 
the great army of drnnuners. As Dr. Warfield 
said this week, their favorite book is the mileage 
book. 

The President of Lafayette has recently had 
added to his other business activities, a branch of 
business administration of which the college presi- 
dent generally knows less than any small boy in 
a college town — namely, the administration of the 
financial side of college athletics. Last year La- 
fayette took in nearly $26,000.00 on its athletic ac- 
count, and paid out $28,000.00, and every cent of 
the $28,000.00 had to be paid out on the presi- 
dent's 0. K. Only yesterday the bursar was 
pointing out what a lot of space athletic pay- 
ments are taking in the voucher records. From 
my own experience, I feel sure that it would be 
a liberal education to any college president to 
enjoy the same experience. 

It goes without saying that the college president 
must be something of a bookkeeper, and be able, 
like the heads of other great corporations, to make 
the figures of his annual report tell the story he 
wishes to tell. He must also be enough of a busi- 
ness man to be able to persuade banks and trust 
companies to let the institution have money at 5 or 
6%, for which the stock broker pays 3 or 4, and not 
to require more than 200% margin for collateral. 
Above all he must be an apostle of publicity in 
corporation affairs, and thoroughly imbued with 
the lesson which the Grovernment has been trying 

250 



Business Side of College Administration 

to hammer into the heads of the American busi- 
ness man, ''However private the affairs of an 
individual may be, the affairs of corporations are 
necessarily public." And the college president, 
as a business man, therefore, if he is to be suc- 
cessful, plays with all his cards on the table. 
They do not only publish all the information they 
work out regarding their institution, but if no one 
comes to investigate, they will create their own 
investigating committees to smell out and spread 
abroad odors of sanctity, or otherwise, which he 
did not even himself suspect. And this reminds 
me that we had almost forgotten to mention that 
ever important aspect of business administration 
— advertising. 

The college president in these days must al- 
ways be himself something of an advertisement. 
As Dr. Pritchett said to me when I came to Lafay- 
ette — "If you can do good work, and in the second 
place, if you can let people know what you are 
doing." This is not a simple problem for the 
business man of the college. If you are making 
shoes, you can tell the people about shoes in your 
advertisement; if you are making crackers, you 
can tell them about crackers; if you are making 
automobiles, you can tell them about automobiles. 
But, while the college president can tell the people 
a lot about football, and a lot about a "cane rush," 
a lot about some scandal or some sensational ut- 
terance of a professor, it is very difficult to tell 
them about the serious solid work in the college. 

Advertising, as such, is not supposed to be good 
251 



Business Side of College Administration 

form for colleges of the higher grade. College 
bulletins as a rule find the quick road to the trash 
basket. In New York, we published a half -million 
new bulletins each year in the hope that perhaps 
one per cent, would find a reader. Some things 
will reach the public if the college president says 
them, by reason of his representative position, 
with the result that college presidents are put in 
a position of talking of a great many things of 
which some other member of the college staff is 
much more competent to speak. 

The president of a great corporation in Phila- 
delphia said to me last winter, *'It is the business 
of you college presidents to try out new theories 
on the public, as you are expected to be somewhat 
daring and erratic. Then we business men can 
come along using for our speeches — things you 
say which the people approve.^' I was glad to 
know that the large amount of talking which the 
college president is expected to do, would serve 
even this useful purpose. 

The college president, as a business man, when 
it comes to a question of raising new capital for 
a larger business, is to be classed rather with min- 
ing adventurers than with the managers of recog- 
nized solid business concerns. He finds few who 
will take stock in a concern whose dividends are 
intangible. Here and there he may find some one 
who will grub-stake him as a gamble in human 
welfare. I know a college president who went to 
one of our millionaire New York merchants to ask 
a subscription to his college. *'Do you give stock 

252 



Business Side of College Administration 

in your university for a subscription?" he asked. 
"No," the president replied, "when we give we 
give." "Well," said the merchant, "when we 
build a synagogue, we issue stock. It don't pay 
much dividends, but then you feel you have some- 
thing for your money." Sixty-five years ago La- 
fayette got a hundred thousand dollars by offer- 
ing perpetual free tuition for every gift of $500, 
but it was not good business. 

I have named three considerations which differ- 
entiate the college president's work as a business 
man from that of other business men. There is, 
however, one fact which is more fundamental than 
any of the other considerations. In most busi- 
nesses the important thing is the product, not the 
process, and in the college the important thing is 
the process. I do not know that I can make this 
entirely clear in a word, but perhaps this example 
may suggest what I have in mind. 

If my business is the manufacture of crackers, 
any new invention applicable to the business may 
be measured as to its desirability by the number 
of crackers it will turn out at a given cost. The 
question of five companies, or one company, may 
be measured in the same way. If it had been pos- 
sible to show beyond a doubt that the Standard 
Oil and American Tobacco had made oil and to- 
bacco cheaper than they could have been under 
competition, from the business point of view, the 
argument would have been entirely in favor of 
the trust. If you are manufacturing crackers and 
can get all the work done by machinery and elimi- 

253 



Business Side of College Administration 

nate human contact, it is desirable to do so. None 
of these things are true in education. The school 
cannot be measured by the number of boys it turns 
out, nor is the process necessarily the best which 
costs the least for the human product. Machinery 
cannot replace the human element, so that the 
phonograph is not of much use in education. 

iWe maintain colleges, not only that the boys 
may be educated, but that the colleges may be liv- 
ing among us, that the community may have 
learned men in its midst to leaven and influence 
society. If we can devise a machine which will 
make it possible for one man to do the work of 
two, it is an advantage to the ordinary business, 
but it is not necessarily an advantage to the future 
if we can so arrange things that the future can 
get along with one professor in Latin instead of 
two professors. In other words, as we approach 
education, we are getting away from things which 
are means to ends, and approach the things which 
are ends in themselves. We ask for what pur- 
pose is all our commercial efficiency. We answer 
that men may have more time to live and enjoy 
life. To what end an eight and ten hour day? 
That the laborer may have some time for enjoy- 
ment and improvement, and life with his family. 
If we try to make these theories specific, we have 
to ask ourselves what is it we want society to be 
doing in the spare time which our improved effi- 
ciency is to make available. Shall we say we want 
society to go to the moving picture shows, to 
motor, to dance, and to eat? These are all pleas- 

254 



Business Side of College Administration 

"arable occupations, and we want society to shari 
as much pleasure as may be wholesome. 

But, if we think further, we must have it in 
mind that there is something more than this for 
society — something which we designate by the 
vague term, progress, so that the American of 
to-morrow will be stronger, larger, wiser than the 
American of to-day. And it is through education 
that we expect this progress to come. For the 
mere imparting of knowledge we want only enough 
teachers to make sure that the next generation 
knows all that we know, but for inspiration, in- 
crease of knowledge, and leadership, we can use 
all the true scholars and teachers which society 
will support. In those nations which rest upon 
a military basis, the business man is thought of 
strictly as a means to an end. In Japan the busi- 
ness man exists that the Samurai may lead his 
heroic life; in Germany the business man exists 
that the soldier and the scientist may advance Ger- 
man Kultur; in America, not having very many 
definite national ideals, we are in danger as a 
nation, as we are in danger as individuals, of mak- 
ing the increase of wealth our national ideal, 
being content to ''hand it to our womenfolk after 
we are gone" to express our ideals with the help 
of the wealth we have accumulated. There never 
was a generation like the last generation, which 
contained so many notable examples of men who 
testified by their wills, *'we do not know what 
money is good for, but perhaps our wives do." 

American education will lose much and gain 

2?? 



Business Side of College Administration 

little if her college presidents become such busi- 
ness men that they know better how a dollar may 
be saved or made, than they know how a dollar 
may be spent to the welfare and progress of man- 
kind. 

We grumble and rebel at the constant call upon 
our purses for community enterprises, but they 
are only growing pains. Society if growing is 
always finding new interests. It is doing more 
things in common, more things by voluntary con- 
tribution. Its interests are wider and less selfish 
to-day than twenty years ago, as this Eotary Club 
testifies. We are doing what the political phil- 
osophers have said we must do, finding in hos- 
pital campaigns, park campaigns, college cam- 
paigns, moral substitutes for war, with some slight 
reflection of war^s heroism and sacrifice. They 
still lack the thrill and splendor of war, perhaps, 
because unlike war they do not demand a willing- 
ness to make the supreme sacrifice, the sacrifice 
of life itself for a great cause. When I first saw 
the Rotarian motto, it was hanging on the wall 
of a hotel dining room, and I thought ' ' He profits 
most, who serves best," was a good waiter's 
motto, but in its wider application to business, it 
invites all business men to share the joys which 
the college president long ago discovered as a 
business man, for there is no pleasure comparable 
to working unselfishly for great ends. 



256 



COLLEGE FELLOWSHIP 

EMERSON begins one of his essays by saying : 
' * The search after the great man is the dream 
of youth and the most serious occupation of man- 
hood. We travel into foreign parts to find his 
works; if possible, to get a glimpse of him, but 
we are put off with fortune instead. The English 
you say are practical, the Germans are hospitable, 
in Valencia the climate is delicious, and in the hills 
of the Sacramento there is gold for the gather- 
ing. Yes, but I do not travel to find comfortable 
rich and hospitable people, or clear sky, or ingots 
that cost too much. But if there were any mag- 
net that would point to the countries and homes 
where are the persons who are intrinsically rich 
and powerful, I would sell all and buy it, and put 
myself on the road to-day.'^ 

I have not found such a magnet, but I have 
come gladly to-day to the hills and valleys of the 
Sacramento and San Gabriel, not for gold, but to 
join with you in throwing open these halls for the 
breeding of persons "intrinsically rich and power- 
ful." 

For what is a college? It is distinguished from 
the school on the one hand, which deals with the 
child by strict discipline and teaches the elements 



Eesponse at dedication of new buildings of Occidental College, 
Pasadena, Cal., 1914. 

257 



College Fellowship 

of knowledge, and from the university on the 
other, which is concerned for knowledge and truth 
for their own sake, with little reference to the 
individual. It shares with the school its care for 
the individual; it shares with the university its 
reverence for truth as the great pedagogue. Its 
chief business is to make men and women, but 
to make them not by blind discipline and dog- 
matic teaching, but by unfolding to them the won- 
drous stores of the household of knowledge, show- 
ing the interrelations of truth, and leading the 
young man and young woman to a true apprecia- 
tion of themselves, of their f ellowmen, and of the 
universe of which they are a part. Because the 
college is essentially an organization of people, 
because it is an organization of people who live 
with the true, the beautiful, and the good, because 
it is the home of the picked youth of our country 
in their prime, and with all the glowing possibil- 
ities of the future germinating within them, it is 
not strange that the American people regard the 
American college as the most attractive institu- 
tion of the world. Even crabbed old Carlyle, 
when he was offered a professorship at Edinburgh, 
said; ''Cannot I make for myself a university in 
any quarter of the Saxon world, by simply hir- 
ing a lecture room and beginning to speak? Yet 
the movement of these young lads is beautiful, is 
pathetic to me, a young generation calling me 
affectionately home (and I already across the 
irremedihilis unda).^^ 

1 bring then to Occidental College, greetings 
258 



College Fellowship 

with a glad heart, and urge you to make the most 
of your calling, and to be always — no matter how 
rich or how learned — a place of, by, and for per- 
sons, a company not of units or things, but of in- 
dividuals. 

There are signs that the learned world is about 
to recover its faith in the unique reality and in- 
dissolubility of individuality. We find the signs 
even in the kindergarten. The greatest contribu- 
tion made to modern pedagogy by Dr. Montessori 
is a revival of the belief in the creative energy of 
the human soul. The stress laid upon science and 
scientific method the last century had well-nigh 
reduced us to thinking that the individual was 
like a picture puzzle, whose existence depended 
entirely on a proper fitting together of the pieces, 
and which could only transmit such energy as 
itself first received. We disregarded all that 
seemed insignificant for scientific study, and then 
like Hamlet, apostrophized a skull, as if it were 
the. living person. We planned college curricula, 
as if college men were merely students, and as a 
faculty, put on the goggles of science and ignored 
all the other aspects of the college student. We 
had a sort of hearsay notion that college boys 
must play, must exercise, must organize, must 
strive physically and even dance and eat, but it 
seemed mse to ignore these aspects of the col- 
lege man, so that these things came to be known 
as extra-curricula activities. The one other activ- 
ity besides study which even a faculty could not 
ignore was sleep, and the recognition of that fact 

259 



College Fellowship 

is forever immortalized in the name dormitory, 
which was as far as the American college was 
prepared to go in recognizing life. But a more 
wholesome age is dawning. Even Darwin was 
ready to admit that there is more in man than the 
breath of his body. 

Politics too is awaking to the fact that this is a 
nation of persons, not primarily of property. 
Our fathers did not want government to concern 
itself with persons lest their freedom be impaired, 
and consigned to government, therefore, the less 
important task of looking after property. It has 
been a sad awakening, therefore, to find — 

' ' 'Tis the day of the chattel, web to weave, corn to grind, 
Things are in the saddle and ride mankind, ' ' 

but having discovered it, we propose to readjust 
the emphasis. Dr. Oppenheimer of the Univer- 
sity of Berlin, who has recently been lecturing at 
Johns Hopkins, is hailed as a second Locke or 
Rousseau, because he enunciates the theory that 
the state is not an organization of property, but 
of persons. 

So too in the Church we see the same redis- 
covery of the importance and uniqueness of the 
individual. We hear the cry back to Christ, the 
gospel of a person. A recent writer says: ''The 
message intrusted to the Son of God when he 
came to be the Savior of mankind was not only 
something which he knew and taught, it was some- 
thing which he was. ' ' Our faith is faith in a liv- 

260 



College Fellowship 

iiig person, not in a dead event or an imprisoned 
force. 

And because the college is personality at its 
best, because it holds and molds our picked men 
and women in the very flower of their strength, 
we may look for new faith and enthusiasm for the 
college which is true to its function. 

What are some of these persons of whom, by 
whom, and for whom the college is? We think 
to-day first of the men and women who have made 
possible these new buildings. Of the men and 
women whose magnificent gift for endowment 
crowns a life of helpfulness. They are not to be 
pitied, but envied. They have parted with wealth, 
they have gained personality. ''What we do," 
says a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, 
''makes us what we are." "We have studied the 
eft'ect of material surroundings upon character, 
and find it to be deep and constant; but man is 
modified far more by exertion than by environ- 
ment. To be surrounded by beauty and right con- 
struction is of value, but far more valuable is it 
to make things beautiful and right. Better make 
palaces and live in a hut, than to make huts and 
live in a palace." Well may we congratulate to- 
day, therefore, the fortunate donors who have 
had a hand in the building of these splendid build- 
ings. Well may we congratulate Occidental that 
it begins its new era with friends thus rewarded 
and enriched. 

Second, we think of the president, planner and 
261 



College Fellowship 

creator both of the material college and of that 
immaterial atmosphere which molds the souls 
of students. Nowhere is the power and reality of 
personality more manifest than in the college pres- 
ident. I have found reproduced in the humblest 
employee of a great industrial organization like 
a railroad the attitude and point of view of the 
president of the system. In the same way, if one 
sits long with a college faculty, he will find in 
the president's personality the key to many a 
psychological attitude. Eeal personalities are 
not as plentiful as Ph.D.'s, and Occidental is rich 
in its president. 

Third, we think of the faculty. The alumnus 
and the learned world think of them first. Lucky 
indeed is the college which has more than one man 
to whom its students can point and say in later 
years — Because of that man, I am what I am. 
And wise is the college president who so conceives 
his fellowship of persons, as to realize, as Presi- 
dent Eliot has said, that the selection of profes- 
sors is his first and most difficult task. 

And fourth, the students, men and women, I 
trust, prepared to work at their job. 

Sentiment in the East has veered sharply the 
last few years. College authorities have been 
under fire. The community is not prepared to 
tolerate inefficiency in its colleges any more than 
in its railroads. If college is primarily a place 
to study, the community demands that the college 
man be a student. If colleges exist to teach men 
to think, the community demands that the college 

262 



College Fellowship 

man learn to think clearly and with precision. 
If colleges are to mold character, the community 
demands that discipline, whether imposed from 
within or without, which distinguishes between 
the man that is there and the man that is not 
there, which tightens fiber and sinew and frowns 
on moral flabbiness. 

Finally, as we survey the college, the company 
of persons thus assembled, the builders, the presi- 
dent, the professors and the students, if we are 
of those who have tried their hand at making with 
these persons a true home of the intrinsically 
rich and powerful, we shall be ready to admit the 
circle still incomplete, and to say with Browning — 

' ' But I need, now as then, 
Thee, God, who mouldest men. ' ' 

Only then do we reach the highest development 
of personality, when His spirit testifies with our 
spirit that we are the sons of God. 

The cry to-day, as ever, is God give us men. 
And God answers the cry. Sometimes the school 
is the carpenter's shop, sometimes the forge, some- 
times the farm, and we ask, ''How has this man 
learning, having never learned?" More often 
to-day the school is the college, a college like Occi- 
dental. So noteworthy of late has been its con- 
tribution, that we think of the college as represent- 
ing and perpetuating the intellectual interests of 
the community, and are ready to say with a recent 
writer: ''Without the proper protection and en- 
dowment of these interests the Church would lan- 

263 



College Fellowship 

guish, its altar fires burn out, and its pulpits be- 
come dumb; life become narrow, literature die." 

The college then is made by persons who give 
and grow in the giving, of persons who teach and 
learn in the teaching, for persons who learn and 
live in the learning. For the college — men are 
at once material, tool and product. 

To such high uses these buildings are opened 
to-day, and to so great a work I bring the greet- 
ing and Godspeed of the College Board and of the 
Presbyterian colleges scattered throughout the 
states. 



264 



THE COLLEGE PRESIDENT 

LIFE, Mr. President, has been defined as the 
power of adjustment to new conditions. 

A son of Illinois, you found an Alma Mater in 
Ohio, and tarried long enough in that state to see 
a cycle of high school students pass, and to claim 
not only an Alma Mater, but a bride. 

Thus dowered and equipped, you sought the far 
Pacific and for a decade have worked arduously 
laying foundations for an enduring civilization, 
where rolls the Oregon. But it is not prodigal 
sons alone who take their journey into a far 
country and who return, nor for them alone do we 
bring out the new gown and hood, and kill the 
fatted calf. In a single stride you have stepped 
across two-thirds of a continent. 

And we, your friends, who have watched you 
grow through these years, who have watched your 
power of adjustment to new conditions, are here 
to give our encouragement and to bid you God- 
speed in this new life upon which you are enter- 
ing. 

We want to see you safely and snugly fitted into 
these new surroundings. 

There is always danger in taking the fly wheel 
off one engine and placing it upon another. If 



Address a,t the inauguration of Harry Means Crooks as Presi- 
ident of Alma College, Alma, Michigan, November, 1916. 

265 



The College President 

there is not proper balance, it may fail to move the 
engine, or race so fast that it flies itself into pieces. 
It is risky to borrow a demountable rim from a 
passing car and transfer it to your own. When 
you fit it, it may be too small for your wheel, or 
may prove so big that its demountableness is un- 
duly developed and while big and splendid in every 
way, you find it will not stay with you long enough 
to pay you for the time you spent tightening up 
the wedges. 

But they know a good deal about such things 
out here in Michigan, at least, so I have been told 
in Detroit, and are taking no risks. When they 
want a Presbyterian college president, they select 
one made in a Presbyterian foundry and tested 
out on Presbyterian proving grounds, and the re- 
sult is, it fits. 

And we who have been called on to turn a screw 
here, or adjust a bearing there, have little to do 
that really matters. Charge the president! He 
is already charged and surcharged with routine 
of ten long successful years. It is left for us to 
oil the machine, to advance or retard the spark, 
or perhaps to pump a little more air into the shock 
absorbers. 

Dr. Foulkes, I hope, is going to look into the 
gasoline tank of the machine, and warn the trus- 
tees of the dangers of letting the supply get low. 
I am expected to explain the mechanism of the 
steering wheel. If Dr. Foulkes is to talk about 
the gasoline that makes the car go, I am to talk 
about ignition and pressure gauge, in a word, 

266 



The College President 

about the president that makes the car go faster 
(or slower, as sometimes happens) and determines *" 
the direction. 

Some of you, no doubt, think that I have my 
metaphors mixed, that it is the president's job to 
keep the tank filled and crank the car, and when 
he has the engine running to jump into the rumble 
and fold his arms and watch which way the trus- 
tees and faculty in the front seat go. Or, per- 
haps, if it is a larger touring car and there are 
seats for four, the alumni and football coach may 
have a share in its operation. But this idea of a 
driver to fill the tank, crank the car, wash it when 
it is dirty, and put on new tires when there is a 
puncture, smacks of aristocracy. We are believ- 
ers in democracy and in that kind of democracy 
lauded by the scripture, ''For that the leaders 
took the lead in Israel, for that the people offered 
themselves willingly. Bless ye the Lord." 

First then, Mr. President, I charge you, lead 
Alma, or to stick to our motor metaphor, steer 
Alma. The responsibility for steering implies of 
course responsibility for steerage way. Whether 
the wind will fill your sails, if there is any wind, 
will depend upon the way you hold your helm. 
How many miles you will get from a gallon will 
depend on your manipulation of your throttle, and 
on your judicious admixture of the proper propor- 
tion of air and gas. 

Of course, if there is no wind stirring at all, it 
is idle for you to stay at the tiller, you may as 
well go out and raise the wind ; if there is no gas- 

267 



The College President 

olirie in your tank, you cannot steer by sitting at 
the wheel, you must either get out and fill the tank 
or get some one to fill it for you. That is inci- 
dental to leadership of any kind. The bravest, 
most original, most daring general at the front 
can do nothing in the present war, unless his sup- 
ply of munitions is well organized. 

But, remember, if you can remember it through 
the toilsome days, that putting the gasoline into 
the tank is incidental. We put gasoline into the 
tank that the car may go, and go whither we would 
have it go. We do not run the car for the purpose 
of finding gasoline at the next garage. 

If there is danger of America being absorbed 
in money getting for its own sake, there is also 
danger that college presidents may catch the same 
disease. College presidents in these days are 
necessarily business men, but American education 
will lose much and gain little if these college presi- 
dents become such business men that they know 
better how a dollar may be saved or made, than 
they know how a dollar may be spent to the wel- 
fare and progress of mankind. The American 
business man may say, ''I enjoy winning the 
money, but I will leave it to my wife to find out 
what it is good for." But no true college presi- 
dent can ever say, ''I have a dollar and no way 
to spend it that seems worth while." 

If, then, my first charge is steer Alma, my sec- 
ond is steer Alma somewhere. Have a destina- 
tion in view. Don't merely go for a ride. The 
police president in Berlin last week forbade the 

268 



The College President 

use of taxicabs for joy riding. You may ride to 
business in a taxi or to a train, but you cannot 
ride to a theater or moving picture show in a taxi. 
And the remarkable thing, as the papers remark, 
is that it is left to the chauffeur to decide whether 
you are riding for pleasure or on business. It 
would be a good thing if our American public 
were a little more willing to leave it to our presi- 
dential chauffeurs to say what is joy riding and 
what is legitimate progression for college boys 
and girls. 

A Philadelphia lawyer who had been debating 
the curriculum of the University of Pennsylvania 
with the faculty said to me last spring, * ' The more 
I talk with the faculty, the more I realize that 
while I have a pretty clear picture of the kind of 
man that I want the university to produce, the 
members of the faculty have no such vision. They 
are content each to do his particular work and 
let the resultant product prove what it will." 

Decide, Mr. President, what kind of boy or girl 
you want Alma to turn out, and having decided, 
adapt your means to that end. No matter whether 
it be the same kind of product as that of the Uni- 
versity of Michigan, or Albion, or Olivet, pro- 
vided it is what it professes to be, provided it is 
the true Alma brand. 

It is not enough to be on the go, you must be 
going somewhere if it is to be worth while. It has 
been said that the favorite book of the college 
president of to-day is the mileage book, with whicJi 
he can travel equally well in either direction. J5e- 

269 



The College President 

ware of the autometer habit. Your credit as a 
college president will not be measured by the num- 
ber of miles your institution reels off. It will be 
judged by the character of the destination to which 
you bring your young men and women, be the 
journey long or short. The name of the institu- 
tion you are to guide suggests that old poem of 
Matthew Prior, written over two hundred years 
ago, entitled, "Alma or the Progress of Mind," 
which begins as some of you may recall : 

''Alma in verse — in prose the mind 
By Aristotle 's pen defined 
Throughout the body squat or tall 
Is bona fide, All in All. 
And yet, slap dash, is All again, 
In every sinew, nerve and vein. 
Runs here and there, like Hamlet 's ghost. 
While everywhere she rules the roast. ' ' 

Now it is not the college president Prior is re- 
ferring to in those lines : 

"Runs here and there, like Hamlet's ghost, 
While everywhere she rules the roast, ' ' 

but to Alma which is poetry's word for mind, and 
he goes on to discuss the two theories, the one 
that the mind is to be found in all parts of the 
body, the other that the mind has its own peculiar 
seat in the brain, and must receive the informa- 
tion and execute its decrees through the mediation 
of the nerves. 
It reminds us of that most perplexing problem 
370 



The College President 

of the college president of to-day, what is educa- 
tion, does it reside in the toe of the football player 
or in the voice of the glee club singer or in the 
brain of the student? 

' ' Alma, they strenuously maintain, 
Sits cock horse on her throne, the brain, 
And from that seat of thought dispenses — 
Her sovereign pleasure to the senses. 
The scholars of the Stagyrite, 
"Who for the old opinion fight, maintain. 
The mind as visibly is seen 
Extended through the whole machine. 
Why should all honor thus be taken. 
From lower parts to load the brain, 
"When other limbs we plainly see. 
Each in his way, as brisk as he?" 

Prior, being a broad-minded president, suggests 
a comproniise: 

"That Alma enters at the toes 
That then she mounts by just degrees 
Up to the ankles, legs and knees, thighs. 
And all these under regions past 
She nestles somewhere near the waist. 
Gives pain and pleasure, grief or laughter 
As we shall show at large hereafter. 
Mature, if not improved by time. 
Up to the heart she loves to climb, 
From thence compelled by craft and age 
She makes the head at latest stage. 
From the feet upward to the head 
Pithy and short says Dick proceed. ' ' 

As yoTir blue book for the journeys upon which 
371 



The College President 

you must guide this modern Alma I suggest to 
you this rich old rhyme of Prior. He willed his 
poems, you may remember, to the college of St. 
John the Evangelist at Cambridge, of which Mr. 
Austin Dobson remarks, even with the copy of 
1718, Johnson might have knocked down Osborn 
the book seller. 

If Alma College, because of its radiant youth, 
can be the practical synonym of mind, you will 
have a trade-mark brand worth while, and if your 
presidential tour can enter in at the toes of your 
football team, and journey with the mind upward 
through the whole frame, so that all of college 
life shall be pervaded with mind, be wise and be 
reasonable, it will be a royal progress indeed, an 
automobile trip for which even a college president 
need not be ashamed to act as chauffeur. 

And my third and last charge is not only to 
steer Alma, not only to steer Alma somewhere, 
but to select the society of Alma, and if possible 
stir and inspire their souls. 

We may jest if we will, with mechajiical meta- 
phors. We may talk of our educational shop, of 
our diploma factory, of our refectory or our dor- 
mitory, the fact remains that what makes the 
work of the college president important and pecu- 
liarly worth while, is that it is a work with, by 
and for persons, nay more, that it is a work with 
the choicest spirits at their most attractive age. 
This is at once its greatest responsibility and its 
greatest reward. Not the road we go then, not 
the city at which we arrive, but the companions 

272 



The College President 

of our journey and the songs of their hearts should 
be our great concern. 

If you ask then what is the college president's 
greatest work, I answer, 'determining the spirit- 
ual atmosphere of his college." When I was a 
college president in the West, and traveled long 
distances over many railroads, I used to think 
that I could detect in the attitude and spirit of 
the brakeman or conductor the attitude and spirit 
of the president of the road. So it is in every 
organization. There is a dominant spirit which 
sets the key. If material gain, if more endow- 
ment, more buildings, larger enrollment, dominate 
your thought, the acquisition of the material things 
of life will dominate the thought and lives of your 
faculty and your students. If victory in sports, 
if popular applause, if ephemeral honors weigh 
with you, these things will weigh with the last 
freshman. If truth and beauty and righteousness 
are the supreme concern of your life, they will 
not be lacking in the spirits of your companions. 

If you look forward to a city which has foun- 
dations whose maker and builder is God, those 
who ride with you, while they may doubt your 
making it before nightfall, will ride with brighter 
eyes, and more radiant faces, and will dwell less 
on the roughness of the roads, the poor food, the 
crowded inns. 

Because too of this transforming power of the 
spirit, the college president will regard the selec- 
tion of his associates in the faculty as his most im- 
portant task. If he can fill his faculty with men 

273 



The College President 

and women of right stamp, and spirit, the rest 
will come of itself. Like President Hyde of Bow- 
doin, you can feel that you have earned your year's 
salary when you have secured three good men for 
your faculty. And having found them, live not 
only for them, but with them. 

In Spenser's ''Fairie Queene," Alma is Queen 
of Body Castle, is the soul dwelling in the body of 
the House of Temperance. Preserve if you can 
such a vision of the Alma you are to know here. 
Never think of her as land and buildings and en- 
dowments, but think of her as a spirit animating 
the souls of her men and her maidens, molding 
her material equipment to spiritual ends, a spirit 
which through her alumni and her faculty shall 
pervade and energize this commonwealth for prog- 
ress and for righteousness. 



274 



THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN 

UNLIKE my brother, the President of Vassar, 
I know little of the education of women, and 
I should not have ventured to accept the invita- 
tion to speak to the graduates of Queens College, 
had the invitation come from any one else than my 
old friend, Dr. McGeachy. In the closing days of 
the century. Dr. McGeachy used to shoot quail and 
I used to help him eat them, out in the Kingdom 
of Calloway. He used to preach and I used to 
practice, and both of us used to be petted and ex- 
ceedingly well cared for by our delightful adopted 
mother, a charming lady of the good old South. 
For these reasons, I am in this predicament to-day, 
not that I have anything of great worth to say 
to you, but in token of my regard for my foster 
brother. Dr. McGeachy, and in recognition of the 
debt I owe him for the fellowship of many years 
ago. 

It has never been my fortune to teach even in 
a coeducational college, let alone in a college for 
women. We had two girls' colleges in that Mis- 
souri town, but I cannot recall that I ever ad- 
dressed them, while Dr. McGeachy was, I know, 
very much in demand as a speaker before them 
both, and though I have been a teacher of psychol- 

Address at the commencement of Queena College, Charlotte, 
K. C, May, 1919. 

275 



The Education of Women 

ogy and taught the President of Vassar all the 
psychology he learned as an undergraduate, he 
would, if he were here, tell you quite as frankly as 
I do, that I do not understand female psychology. 
I, however, would be willing to go further than he 
would go, and add that I do not believe anybody 
else does, for that matter. 

I feel, therefore, that I am perhaps rash in 
venturing the statement, which I propose to make 
the subject of the few remarks I have to make 
this morning, that if we were to gather up the 
aspirations and thoughts and ambitions of the 
young womanhood of America, who like you of 
Queens College are completing their college 
courses, and attempt to name these desires, often 
imperfectly understood, rarely ever defined even 
to yourselves, in a single word, that single word 
would not be knowledge, or wealth, or love, or 
power, or fame, but life. Robert Grant in his 
recent article on the limits of feminine independ- 
ence rather misses the point and shows an extra- 
ordinary ignorance of styles for a Boston judge, 
when he says, "Women's nature has not changed 
as the result of the war, she has merely ceased to 
wear hobbles." Something much more funda- 
mental has happened. More than in any preced- 
ing age, because more intelligent and freer from 
restraint, because, too, rendered economically in- 
dependent by the many occupations opened to 
women, the number of which has been greatly mul- 
tiplied by the war, the young women of our age 
are determined, as they say, to live, to run the 

276 



The Education of Women 

gamut of the emotions, to test the heights of 
human joy and the depths of human suffering, 
to help unflinching in the pursuit of truth, to win 
again for woman that equal standing among the 
divinities of Olympus which ancient Greece was 
so ready to yield to Juno, to Venus and to Diana. 

If I were called upon not as a theologian, but as 
a psychologist to write the creed of American 
womanhood, I should be tempted to write it in the 
words of John Euskin, "There is no wealth hut 
life. Life including all the powers of love, of joy, 
and of admiration. That country is the richest 
which nourishes the greater number of noble and 
lofty beings; that man (or woman) is richest who 
having perfected the functions of his own life to 
the utmost has also the widest helpful influence, 
both personal and by means of his possessions, 
over the lives of others." 

There is no wealth hut life, that is what the 
American woman is saying to herself again and 
again, as she hurries on from experience to expe- 
rience. And because woman naturally expresses 
life in emotion rather than in idea, in feeling 
rather than in thought, in concrete rather than in 
abstract terms, she is less content to take her expe- 
rience at second hand than is her brother. A 
second-hand idea is a very serviceable thing. In- 
deed, according to Plato and his school, all ideas 
are second hand except the prototype from which 
they spring; but a second-hand emotion is stale 
and profitless. The emotions which are provoked 
by novel reading or by motion pictures are not as 

277 



The Education of Women 

poignant or as vital as the emotions which spring 
from your own immediate experience in the world 
of sense, but at least they are first-hand emotions. 
The tears may be provoked by a fairy tale, but 
they are real tears, and even in supreme tragedy 
Mary perhaps by the wonderful power of womanly 
sympathy feels even more keenly than Jesus the 
piercing sword in her breast. 

No one who fails to understand that woman 
measures life in terms of emotion, where man 
measures it in terms of action or of idea, can, I 
think, comprehend very clearly the social move- 
ments of our time. And any one who wants to 
write a philosophy of education for women must 
be prepared to tell us how you can label, and 
classify and store away in books emotions, so 
that they will still remain emotions when intro- 
duced as the lessons of to-morrow. Words are a 
convenient legal tender for the circulation of the 
silver of ideas; are they equally serviceable as a 
legal tender for the precious gold of emotions? 
Can we rely as much on the printed page, or must 
we use living leaders and teachers? 

Now the first danger which to an outsider seems 
likely to lie in wait to entrap an adventurer guided 
by the philosophy, ''there is no wealth but life," 
is the assumption that any experience which comes 
along in life, with an emotional content, just be- 
cause it is life is wealth. To he, in other words, is 
according to this philosophy so infinitely superior 
to not being that other petty distinctions of value 
sink into insignificance. Just to be alive is in- 

278 



The Education of Women 

finitely more significant and of far greater value 
than to be true or to be beautiful or to be good. 

Life according to this view is a two dimensioned 
affair, it is long and it is wide. It is to be reached 
by movement and travel, the mud holes taken 
with the macadam, the hills with the valleys, the' 
swamps with the sands, the jungles with the moun- 
tain tops. Ancient philosophers used to point out 
the absolute uniqueness of the right hand and the 
left hand in that they defied absolutely the phil- 
osopher's attempt to reduce all things to unity, 
because laid upon a flat surface no juggling would 
convert a left hand into a right hand. There was 
an irreducible difference which could not be got- 
ten rid of. So of this surface philosophy of life. 
The interesting thing about land is that every bit 
has its own position on the surface of the earth. 
Here is not there, and there is not here, and how- 
ever much two fields may look alike, they differ in 
this ineradicable quality of location. It is the 
same sort of an ineradicable quality of location 
in the surface of experience, which the womanhood 
of America urges as giving to all experience, how- 
ever trite in the history of the race, a claim to 
uniqueness and to value, and nothing is gained by 
denying this fact. My joy is not your joy. My 
sorrow is not your sorrow. Consequently woman 
is apt to be impatient with the educator or school 
master who would fence off the bogs of life and 
leave only the safe highways to serve for her jour- 
neyings. Man has been a little too ready to assert. 
You may make the kitchen fire, but the ballot 

279 



The Education of Women 

would soil your hands. It is not for the lower 
animals alone that a fence adds peculiar sweetness 
to the pasture just outside. And in the case of 
woman it is sheer waste of time to try to build 
them. You must put your trust rather in guiding 
stars or in haunting pipes of Pan. 

As you all know we have recently passed through 
a period in literature, in art, in music, if indeed, 
we are through it, which we dubbed realism, which 
was based on the kind of a two dimensioned phil- 
osophy to which I have referred. A thing need 
only be, according to this philosophy, to be worth 
while. Other scales of values sank into insignifi- 
cance before this stupendous fact. Making edu- 
cation universal was Hke removing the scales from 
the eyes of the bhnd, and the same thing hap- 
pened. The novitiates saw things flat. 

It was against this art destroying two dimen- 
sioned philosophy that Whistler wrote so elo- 
quently in protest : 

''Nature contains the elements in color and form 
of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes 
of all music. But the artist is born to pick and 
choose, and group with science these elements, that 
the result may be beautiful — as the musician gath- 
ers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings 
forth from chaos glorious harmony. To say to the 
painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to 
say to the player, that he may sit on the piano, ' ^ — 
which was, by the way, about what Strauss did. 

Nor is it strange that a period which overvalued 
reality, should have been followed by the futurists 

280 



The Education of Women 

who deny reality all significance and declare all 
that matters is the way you see it. The world of 
art and literature and music, somewhat in advance 
of the broader world of womanhood's hopes and 
aspirations, has passed, I trust forever, beyond the 
fallacies of a two dimensioned philosophy, and in 
view of that fact in the twenty minutes allowed me 
by Dr. McGeachy, I want to set up at the cross- 
roads of life at which you now stand a bit of a 
danger sign in the form of a question mark after 
the creed, Life is Wealth, lest you choose inad- 
vertently the way to this arid desert and lose time 
in the pursuit of life thereby. 

William Hard in his striking editorial on Theo- 
dore Roosevelt at the time of his death, pointed out 
that the great characteristic of Roosevelt was that 
with all his zest for life and his readiness to live 
life to the full, with all the many sidedness of his 
genius, he knew poisons and displayed no militant 
interest in testing them. His experience was a 
discriminating experience. He was content to 
submit for example to the bounds of family life. 
Moral morasses held no appeal to him as a moral 
naturalist. He would hunt big game in Africa 
and trace unknown flora and fauna in South Amer- 
ica, but his adventurous spirit never tempted him 
to flirt with evil, or pursue unclean spirits to dis- 
cover the sociological status of their foul smelling 
homes in the swamp. 

There was a teacher nineteen centuries ago, too, 
who had a creed that Life was Wealth. ''I am 
come," he said, ''that they might have life and 

281 



The Education of Women 

might have it more abundantly," — and yet so nar- 
row were the limits of the way of this abundant 
life, that his disciples came to be known as pre- 
eminently those ''of the way." What made it a 
way? Not a fence but a goal to be reached. In 
order that this life you see may be worth while, 
you must have some sort of an ideal or guiding 
star. A man may roam at random on a prairie, 
but to climb a mountain you must stick to the trail. 
Your college bears the proud title of Queens — 
a title somewhat at a discount, perhaps, just now, 
but the idea behind the title was never more widely 
cherished than to-day. When the Presbyterians 
abolished bishops they did it by making all min- 
isters bishops. When it was proposed to abolish 
titles in the French Eevolution, the suggestion was 
made that a more effective way would be to give 
every one a title. It is not so much that the world 
of to-day does not want kings and queens as that 
all want to be kings and queens. But remember 
noblesse oblige, — nobility binds. You are all fa- 
miliar with the doctrine of sovereignty here in 
North Carolina. The old political scientists used 
to contend that a nation restricted by anything but 
its own will was not a true nation, and a lot of our 
statesmen are echoing this old outworn cry in 
connection w^ith the League of Nations. It was a 
doctrine of sovereignty worthy of a simpler age, 
but not worthy of our complex age. Cut all your 
relationships which bind you to your fellowmen 
to-day and how helpless you would be ! Let even 
the most powerful nation isolate itself from inter- 

282 



The Education of Women 

national relations and would its freedom, its great- 
ness, its power, be increased thereby ? On the con- 
trary in this day greatness is in proportion to 
complexity of relationship. Only the man who ac- 
cepts the relationships in which he finds himself, 
only the man who is willing to enter new relation- 
ships of the greatest variety, can rise to true great- 
ness in this modern world. And what is true of 
man is true also of women, and of sovereign states. 

The miser who puts his gold in a stocking is 
more completely in control of his wealth than the 
man who puts it in a bank, but the man whose 
money is in the bank is more powerful than the 
man with money in his stocking, because he can 
pay bills in New York or Richmond more easily. 
So with every relationship into which we enter. 

We need to preach a new doctrine of sover- 
eignty. Sovereignty is not folded hands, sover- 
eignty is service. He that would be great among 
you, let him be servant of all, is as true of states 
as of individuals and gives to a college bearing the 
name of Queens, a new significance. Robinson 
Crusoe on his island was a sovereign if ever there 
was one, but who wants to be Robinson? and even 
if you did you could not turn the clock backward. 
America a member of the League of Nations will 
find fewer obstacles to the accomplishment of 
her purposes than America isolated. Therefore, 
America bound in a league is more sovereign in 
the only attribute of sovereignty that really mat- 
ters, the power to achieve her aim, than America 
outside restricting alliances. This is a hard doc- 

283 



The Education of Women 

trine for woman, of whom it is said that what she 
chiefly wants is to have her own way, but it is also 
easy for her because she has so long been used to 
enter into the sovereignty of her womanhood 
through the restricting covenant of marriage. 

I ask you young ladies of Queens to adopt this 
Christian doctrine of sovereignty for the state, and 
then to re-read your creed, Life is Wealth, in its 
light. 

I think we all sympathize with the womanhood 
of to-day as it seizes upon life, with new avidity, 
with a new determination to wring from it the last 
drop of both the bitter and the sweet, as it pushes 
out to join her brothers in the wide fields of civic 
and political action. If we join as we all do for 
our young men in the prayer of Tennyson, ''Let 
knowledge grow from more to more,'^ we also, I 
am sure, would acclaim a poet who would phrase 
the enrichment of human emotion, the greater joys, 
the deeper griefs, the intenser longings, the more 
perfect truth for which we look with confidence 
to the educated woman of the new day. But let 
me warn you not to make the mistake of Germany. 
There was a day when predatory fighting and im- 
perial aspirations were regarded as the legitimate 
ideals of the state. For the pursuit of such ideals, 
Germany had the misfortune of being born too 
late. 

Man once knew a world of two dimensions. To- 
day he knows three and looks for a fourth. A 
philosophy which measures life by distance and 
variety of experience only, which looks out over 

284 



The Education of Women 

the world as you do to-day from the threshold of 
this school, and says the more varied experience 
I have, the more things I do, the more flavors I 
taste, the more of life I shall be having, will find 
herself like Germany, born too late. Had Ger- 
many been willing to follow Goethe rather than 
Nietsche, and to say with him, Restriction by vol- 
untary choice is the mark of the master spirit, 
Germany had been great to-day. 

In a psychological as well as in a theological 
sense your kingdom is within you. The great soul 
may taste life in its fullness, live life in its full- 
ness, find itself the peer and congenial friend of 
the master spirits of life, in what one of your two 
dimension philosophers would call a two by four 
existence. You cannot very well avoid sharing 
the belief of your day, Life is Wealth, and inter- 
preted aright it is a very wholesome psychological 
creed, far better certainly than the creed of so 
many Americans, Wealth is Life; but strive to 
pass beyond the primary grade in which the new 
woman tarries with her naive valuation of every- 
thing that is, because it is, and to enter those 
higher grades of life's school, where pupils have 
the time and the initiative to appraise lights and 
shadows, to think more of quality and less of quan- 
tity, to accept restrictions and limitations because 
they help you to self-mastery and to the attain- 
ment of that perfection without which life turns 
stale and meaningless. 

' ' Forenoon and afternoon and night — Forenoon, 
And afternoon and night — 
285 



The Education of Women 

Forenoon and — what ! 
The empty song repeats itself, no more? 
Yea that is Life, make this forenoon sublime, 
This afternoon a psalm, this night a prayer. 
And Time is conquered, and thy crown is won. ' ' 

And above all do not dwell so much in the din 
of the world that you will have no share in that 
life of the spirit which properly nourished comes 
to fruition as the life of sense and of emotion and 
of ambition fail. 

"Very early," says Margaret Fuller, ''I per- 
ceived that the object of life is to grow. " Growth 
doubtless has been more or less in your thoughts 
these last recent years because of your physical 
growth. Perhaps you have said to yourselves, I 
am now grown up, and have dismissed the idea of 
growth from your mind. If so remember growth 
has only begun. If a piece of land has been 
burned over, nature has a way of covering it 
quickly with blackberry briars, then with poplars 
or birches or maples, but all the time underneath, 
the slow growing pine is germinating and growing 
steadily, ready to take its place and stand when 
the others are over and gone. So with the human 
soul, sheltered first under the physical growth, 
emerging slowly in the shadow of the more quickly 
growing intellectual life, comes the slow growing 
spiritual life, if not trampled upon or uprooted. 
In the turmoil of life's excitements, upon which 
you are about to enter, if at any time you should 
be tempted to look for something more beautiful, 
more gratifying than anything you may have 

286 



The Education of Women 

found in the wide travels of experience, don't for- 
get when you have looked everywhere else, to look 
within, and then may you have the poet's experi- 
ence : 

''To feel a poem in your heart to-day a still thing 

growing 
As if the darkness to the outer light a song were owing, 
A something strangely vague and sweet and sad, 
Fair, fragile, slender, 
Not tearful, yet not daring to be glad, 
And oh so tender 

It may not reach the outer world at all 
Despite its growing ; 
Upon a poem bud such cold winds fall 
To blight its blooming. 
But, oh, whatever may the thing betide. 
Free life or fetter, 

My heart, just to have held it till it died 
Will be the better." 

I wish for you graduates of Queens not only 
life in its fullness, but life at its best. I wish for 
you that true culture, that true womanly experi- 
ence so well described by Van Dyke as ''The Light 
of seeing things clearly and truly. The sweet- 
ness of imaginative vision by which we behold 
things old and new, and enter into other hearts 
and lives. The joy of free and sane thinking for 
ourselves, and above all, the power of resolutely 
choosing out of all that knowledge and experience 
bring the best, to love, admire and follow." 



287 



BEOADER EDUCATION OF ENGINEERS 

IT is a great pleasure to me to be present this 
evening, and to see this large body of engi- 
neers gathered in the interests of the School of Ap- 
plied Science. 

When I entered college at Washington Square, 
the School of Engineering was a room, a professor 
and an assistant. Before I became a sophomore, 
they had added to this School an associate pro- 
fessor; and ever since, during the twenty-two 
years which have elapsed, I have been interested 
in the successive expansions of the School and of 
the man who then became associated with it and 
who is now our honored Dean, to whose devoted 
service we owe so much of what the School has 
been able to accomplish. 

Some time ago I met a man who employs a 
large number of engineers in his office, taking them 
from a half dozen engineering schools; and he 
said that, on the whole, the men of the School of 
Applied Science had given him better satisfaction 
than the men of any other school. I am glad that 
our training in engineering produces good men, 
because I have been especially struck recently by 
the expanding horizon of engineering as a profes- 
sion, and by the demands which other professions 



Address before the alumni of the School of Applied Science, 
New York University, 1912. 

288 



Broader Education of Engineers 

are coming to make upon it. We are somewhat 
puzzled to know, for example, whether the new 
profession of Public Health Officer — the advance 
agent of that preventive medicine whose business 
it will be to keep people well instead of curing them 
when sick — should find its roots in engineering and 
belong with water supply and drainage, or whether 
it should find its roots in medicine and begin with 
cadavers and calomel; or whether the sanitary 
expert and public health officer should be propa- 
gated in the common garden of the microbe and 
then transplanted to their respective professional 
schools. The Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 
nology thinks that the public health belongs to 
them, while Harvard conceives it as a post-grad- 
uate function of the medical school. 

Recently we have heard that only an engineer 
is competent to say when a transfer is not a trans- 
fer, and when a strap will serve as a seat ; though 
the claim seems to have fallen on barren ground, 
and it has been shown that the less one knows 
about municipal ownership or engineering the 
better qualified one is to care for public transpor- 
tation. It is a hopeful sign, however, as showing 
ambition on the part of engineers to enlarge their 
part in the public service. 

In connection with the subject of city planning, 
upon which I have been conducting a research 
course this winter, I have been interested to note 
the claim of an engineer, that because the problem 
of city planning is a problem of motion, not of 
static conditions, it is a problem for the engineer 

289 



Broader Education of Engineers 

rather than for the architect; and this view has 
been borne out by the fact that of the score or 
more of plans which have been provided by ex- 
perts for cities of the United States, perhaps the 
most far-reaching and thorough, and the one pre- 
pared with the least delay, was the plan of the 
City of Seattle, and that plan was prepared by a 
city engineer. And yet the engineers took no 
part in the original organization of the City 
Planning Conferences; and as Professor Swain, 
Professor of Civil Engineering at Harvard Uni- 
versity and himself a member of the Boston Tran- 
sit Commission, said at the last conference: ''Not- 
withstanding the prominence of engineering prob- 
lems among those which city planning has to solve, 
the engineer has not as yet become sufficiently 
identified with the movement or the organization. ' ' 
It is interesting to note, however, that ten engi- 
neers have now been associated with the general 
committee, of whom New York furnishes five. 
"When this winter the Fifth Avenue Association 
wanted to form a committee of expert advisers, 
we had much greater difficulty in naming engineers 
of national reputation who had manifested any 
interest in the larger civic problems, than in nam- 
ing architects with such qualifications. 

Take this matter of city planning, as a matter 
now very prominently before the public, — it deals 
primarily with land, the same material with which 
the civil engineer deals. And yet, what is the con- 
tribution which the engineers of this city are 
making toward a revision of our notion of the 

290 



Broader Education of Engineers 

rights of private ownership in land with a view 
to the city's highest welfare? How many engi- 
neers have said a word for the Excess Condemna- 
tion Bill, now before our Legislature the second 
time, without which new streets in the crowded 
parts of the city are a practical impossibility? 
We know that Mr. Lewis and Mr. Tuttle have 
been leaders in the matter, but have they been 
backed up by a profession with large views of 
civic life and civic responsibility? Is the profes- 
sion so organized that it can make sure that the 
responsible posts in our city engineering depart- 
ments are filled by competent men? And when 
a good man is secured, are they protecting him 
and his profession against the insidious encroach- 
ments of the Comptroller's office — the misguided 
effort for efficiency, and against politicians seek- 
ing spoils? Do you think the chief engineer of 
a city borough ought to be a man honest enough 
to say how many drawing tables he needs, without 
having his statement questioned and a separate 
investigation made by the Comptroller's office? 
What is your view of a city government which 
tests the work done by an engineer entrusted with 
the designing and layout of great boulevards, by 
checking up the miles of maps made by him with 
the number of miles made by his predecessor in 
a given number of days, and which tells him to 
** speed up," because the mileage is less per day 
and per hour? What do you think of a city which 
turns over the designing of a great boulevard 
to a young man who does not even know where 

291 



Broader Education of Engineers 

the Champs-Elysees is, and has only a hazy recol- 
lection of having heard of Unter den Linden? 

I believe in enlarging the sphere of the engi- 
neering profession. There is something in the 
drill of an engineering education, just as there is 
in the drill of a West Point education, which fits 
a man to do great tasks well. The mathematics 
of the engineer has immediate application and is 
tested by experience. Accuracy is vital; inaccu- 
racy fraught with grave consequences. The infin- 
ite detail of the engineer's work teaches patience 
and persistence. And these three qualities — ac- 
curacy, patience and persistence — will carry a man 
far. If to these we add a constructive imagina- 
tion, without which no great engineering feats 
are accomplished, we shall have men well quali- 
fied for public service of wide range. It was an 
act of deep significance, and a high compliment 
to the engineering profession, when the erection 
of our new Municipal Building was placed under 
the supervision of our Department of Bridges. 

The broader the sphere of the profession, how- 
ever, the more necessary that we see to it that the 
engineer be broadly trained. As the Dean has 
often said — ^it is as important that an engineer 
know men as that he know materials. It is im- 
portant that he know something of economics, of 
theories of land tax, of unearned increment, and 
of the taxation of improvements, if we are to 
consult with him on the tenure of land; — that he 
study the housing problem and the science of city 
planning, the relation of factories to labor mar- 

292 



Broader Education of Engineers 

kets, if he is to represent us in our Public Serv- 
ice Commission ; that he know the history of trade 
and commerce, if he is to plan our docks, build 
our bridges, and dredge our rivers ; that he know 
something of what the new English Town Plan- 
ning Law calls amenity, which in England has as- 
sumed sufficient definiteness to be made a legal 
concept, so that he will not put one gas tank be- 
side Grant's Tomb on the Hudson Eiver, and 
outdo it with a larger one between Webb's Acad- 
emy and New York University on the Harlem 
River. 

It is quite as important that the engineer should 
be in touch with the best thought and aspiration 
of his day, as it is that our Court of Appeals 
should keep its library of economic and sociologi- 
cal books up to date. And toward this ideal there 
is great opportunity for our School of Applied 
Science to contribute. Our great corporations 
are beginning to look toward the universities for 
help. The president of the United Electric Light 
& Power Company is proud to refer to the fact, 
that in building the power plant on the Harlem, 
they have availed themselves of the advice of ex- 
perts from the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 
nology, from Sheffield and other scientific schools, 
on questions of smoke, stoking and water cur- 
tains. And if we can find the necessary endow- 
ment to insure a reasonable livelihood, we may 
be sure that there will be none who will do more 
for the profession and the public welfare than the 
expert professors of New York University, kept 

293 



Broader Education of Engineers 

in touch with stern reality by the terrific life of 
this metropolis, in touch with the humanities by 
the students and professors of Liberal Arts — 
with whom they share a common campus, and 
with art and amenity by the beauty of site and 
buildings, to which we trust Engineering will soon 
make its own appropriate contribution. 



■I 
294 \ 



EDUCATIONAL EESEARCH 

IT is a great pleasure to me to be present at 
this luncheon of the Doctors of Pedagogy, to 
recall to you the objects for which the School was 
organized, to review its work and to consult re- 
garding the future. Although not an alumnus of 
this School, I feel a strong personal attachment 
to it. The School of Pedagogy began its work 
in the university as a fully organized professional 
school at the same time that I began my work as 
a freshman, both entering the university circle 
in the fall of 1890 in the old building at Wash- 
ington Square. The undergraduate of those days, 
it is true, was not brought into close touch with 
the work of the School of Pedagogy and there 
was no provision such as exists to-day by which 
seniors looking forward to the profession of teach- 
ing could take work in the School of Pedagogy. It 
was our good fortune, however, as juniors and 
seniors to profit indirectly from the establish- 
ment of the School and I still recall with peculiar 
pleasure the hours spent in the study of logic 
with the first Dean of the School, Dr. Jerome 
Allen, and hours in rhetoricals with that other 
great teacher who followed Dr. Allen as Dean, 
Dr. Edward R. Shaw. If I add to this knowledsre 



Address before the Society of the Doctors of Pedagogy, New 
York City, 1911. 

295 



Educational Research 

as a scholar of two members of the original fa- 
culty, my acquaintance with Dr. Shimer, who was 
the third member of the original faculty dating 
from almost the same time, you will admit that I 
am justified in regarding the School of Pedagogy 
as a contemporary and an old friend. 

A recent writer in the '^ Educational Review," 
under the title "The Temptations of a College 
President," gives this interesting cross section of 
the daily mail of a college executive: 'inquiries 
from candidates for the freshman class with many 
intellectual and financial weaknesses about which 
advice was needed ; from candidates for places on 
the faculty to fill vacancies existing or hoped for ; 
from an uneasy professor of another college who 
inclosed a blank, which he said he had sent to 
five hundred others asking for information as to 
the best place to purchase frying-pans for the col- 
lege refectory and the number, shape, and size in 
millimeters of those most needed; from the best 
lecturer in America who would for ten dollars 
give his unrivaled effort on 'The Psychology of 
the Forward Pass'; from a lady who desired his 
name as honorary vice-president of an association 
to supply anti-bacterial bacteria to the children of 
immigrants ; and from a miscellaneous assortment 
of seekers of detailed advice on subjects unin- 
teresting to himself or any one else but the 
writer. ' ' 

We all recognize it as true picture. There is, 
however, another side to it. As all of us find the 
morning newspaper of perpetual interest as a 

296 



Educational Research 

cross section of the world's doings, so the man ot 
a college office retains perpetual interest because 
it is a cross section of what the world is think- 
ing. If we take it altogether — publishers' an- 
nouncements of new books, invitations to in- 
numerable banquets with the topics assigned to a 
great array of speakers, letters of cranks with 
here and there an occasional genius, scholarly 
monographs of the new generation of college 
teachers, reports of conventions, newspaper clip- 
pings of a thousand and one things of supposed in- 
terest, the speech of a Congressman, the plea of a 
candidate for city office, a pamphlet on peace, a 
pamphlet on woman's suffrage, a pamphlet on 
conservation, a pamphlet on the education of the 
negro, a pamphlet an rapid transit, a pamphlet on 
deep waterways, a new governmental map of 
Saskatchewan, a bulletin on schools in the Philip- 
pines — while we may not have time to give any 
careful examination to the rapidly dissolving 
view, we find a perpetual interest in observing 
the ever changing kaleidoscope of human thought, 
and the thoughtful observer will detect here and 
there an idea or a creed which promises to furnish 
events for the newspaper of ten years hence. 

The same mail which brought a request from 
your secretary to name a subject for my remarks 
to-day, brought a card which was in many re- 
spects unique and which doubtless many of you 
have seen, setting forth that John Peter Huf- 
nagel, born in St. Louis, Mo., 1867, was a Repub- 
lican candidate for the office of United States Sen- 

297 



Educational Research 

ator for Missouri on the platform of a national 
certificate for teachers and a national diploma for 
graduates. It struck me as remarkable that the 
status of the teacher should be a question of para- 
mount importance in the election of a United 
States Senator, and it struck me as still more re- 
markable that it should be a question of para- 
mount importance in Missouri, where, ten years 
ago, I used to attend teachers' conventions and 
talk in percentages of illiteracy and where stu- 
dents of our preparatory department frankly ad- 
mitted that they were studying algebra so as to 
keep at least a week ahead of the class which they 
were teaching in the public school. 

The same mail brought me a newspaper from 
Buenos Ayres, South America, which had an illus- 
tration showing one of our university instructors 
addressing a large audience on commercial educa- 
tion in the United States. 

At the same time, there came to me from my 
mother an account of her visit to a public school 
held in an old Buddhist temple at Karuizawa, Ja- 
pan, with a photograph by herself of a hundred 
of the bright, intelligent Japanese faces and an 
account of the difficulty she had had in making the 
Japanese teacher understand the significance of 
the word ''breeze" in the line of America ''Let 
music swell the breeze." From my mother's de- 
scription, I judge that what impressed her most 
in this elementary school was the fact that the 
children held their heads up when they read, hold- 
ing the books by the lower comers, and that there 

298 



Educational Research 

was not a single dog-eared book in the school. 
The accounts which I have received since of their 
visits to the great technical school at Port Arthur 
and to many other colleges and schools, and the 
Japanese and Chinese papers printed in English 
and the Y. M. C. A. bills announcing the Chan- 
cellor's addresses half in English and half in 
Chinese, have all helped to make me realize as I 
have not realized before, how in the education of 
their children, the world has a common interest 
which is universal as perhaps no other interest 
is universal. I heard this summer that a man of 
large wealth had declared that he felt that one of 
the things that would be best worth while would 
be an international investigation of school sys- 
tems and a promulgation for the benefit of all 
nations of any improvement in method or peda- 
gogical fact discovered in one country. It was 
the feeling of his keen mind that there was waste 
of human energy in putting professors in Ger- 
many to solve educational problems for the Ger- 
man people and professors in America to solve 
educational problems for the American people 
without provision for some systematic exchange 
of results. We shall doubtless see some time soon 
a world conference on education. The educational 
horizon is broadening. When I was in Missouri, 
they were striving to convince the independent 
school districts and the county managements that 
state requirements and supervision of a state 
superintendent were not an abridgement of the 
freedom of the American citizen. They were try- 

299 



Educational Research 

ing to widen the horizon from the local school dis- 
trict to the width of the county and the state, 
and they met, I can assure you, with a great deal 
of opposition in those good old Bourbon counties. 
Ten years later the candidate for United States 
Senator appeals for the suffrage of the people 
of Missouri on a platform which declares the state 
horizon too narrow a horizon for the educational 
world. 

The importance of a wide horizon in education 
has been realized by the School of Pedagogy from 
the beginning. While the course of study for the 
year 1891 stopped short with a critical examina- 
tion of national, state, county, city and district 
systems, the course of study for 1892-3 added a 
course on the school systems of Europe and Amer- 
ica. The horizon is broadening when the Secre- 
tary of the Interior acts favorably on the request 
for an appropriation of $75,000 for national re- 
search in education. The horizon is broadening 
when the desire to know takes such a strong hold 
of the Board of Estimate of this city of New 
York that it is willing to spend $50,000 for a 
single course of study of the local school system. 
If there is any one here who has found in the 
smaller number of students in the School of Peda- 
gogy a reason for believing that the work of the 
School has been accomplished and that the neces- 
sity which brought it into existence no longer 
exists, that one is as far astray in his judgment 
of the field of knowledge as one would be who 
should argue that the microscope being so small 

300 



Educational Research 

as compared with the telescope, the knowledge 
to which it gives access must be correspondingly 
unimportant. It is a day of monoplanes and bi- 
planes, of Antoinettes and Zeppelins. That an 
island is a body of land surrounded by water is 
becoming of less geographical importance than 
that skyscrapers discharge strong currents of air 
heavenward. The imaginary birdseye view has 
become a reality. The university, as well as the 
individual, must be up and doing would it keep 
abreast of truth. 

I nominate to you to-day, therefore, the School 
of Pedagogy as an efficient agent for a broader 
study of education than the world has yet under- 
taken. On the platform of mankind's common 
interest in the education of its children, I nomi- 
nate to you a national school of pedagogy with 
an international vision as a powerful factor in 
the world's unity and peace. I ask you to con- 
sider if it costs the city of New York $50,000 
to learn the truth about its own school system, 
what sums might profitably be employed by 
such a national school of pedagogy in the inves- 
tigation and comparison of the systems of the 
world. I ask you to consider what sum might suit- 
ably be employed in a world conference on educa- 
tion if the preliminary fund for a world confer- 
ence on Christian unity is given a hundred thou- 
sand dollars as a start. It is a day of large things. 
It is a day of national interchange of professors. 
It is a day of pilgrimages of students from coun- 
try to country, a day when the reformer from In- 

301 



Educational Research 

dia studies in America to prepare for the over- 
throw of English rule, when the Japanese studies 
in America to be the better equipped for controlling 
Russia and runs typewriters in Tokio and automo- 
biles in Manchuria. When I was in Cripple Creek, 
Colorado, I saw the same new novels and the same 
weekly publications on sale at the stationer's store 
that I had seen in New York. When I was in 
Vancouver on the Pacific and in Halifax on the 
Atlantic, I found a paper published in Philadel- 
phia placed on sale on the same day on which it 
was placed on sale in New York. It is a day when 
a thing worth reading by one English speaking 
person is worth reading, and can be read, 
by a hundred million English speaking persons. 
There never was a time when research was bet- 
ter worth while or when truth found a larger audi- 
ence. Is not the time ripe, therefore, to take 
a broader view of the work of the School of Peda- 
gogy, to remember that the miscroscope holds 
sway in the world of science to-day and that in- 
vestigations to be valuable must be minute and 
exact, that it is worth while to measure by the 
millimeter when the results are for the millions 
and at the same time to remember that this age 
of the miscroscope is also the age of the airship 
which knows no geographical boundaries and 
which has added a third dimension to the lines of 
travel? I for one am anxious to see the School 
of Pedagogy enter this larger field. I want en- 
dowments which will make it possible for men to 
give their whole time to knowing our American 

302 



Educational Research 

school systems as they exist to-day, so that New 
York may boast a man of encyclopedic knowledge 
and a recognized international authority on all 
questions of fact relating to American school sys- 
tems. I want endowments so that the School of 
Pedagogy may have a professor who will be as 
familiar with the details of the New York pub- 
lic school system and the personnel of its teach- 
ing force as our professor of chemistry is with the 
contents of his laboratory. I want endowments 
for traveling fellowships which shall make it pos- 
sible to bring back to the students of the School of 
Pedagogy first hand knowledge of foreign school 
systems. I want endowments for visiting lecture- 
ships so that students of the School of Pedagogy 
may study foreign school systems not only through 
American eyes but from the lips of those officials 
of Japan, China or India, as the case may be, best 
qualified to speak. I want fellowships for for- 
eigners so that the teacher from Germany, India 
and Japan may study in the same class with the 
teacher in America and so create among Ameri- 
cans an interest in things foreign and a cosmo- 
politan point of view such as springs only from 
the interest which centers around a personality. 
Perhaps you will think these presumptuous 
dreams for a poor institution like ours, but I have 
always held with Plato as against Aristotle, that 
the small things of to-day are real in what they 
borrow from great ideals rather than that great 
ideals are real in proportion as they are common 
to the things of to-day. The University was 

303 



Educational Research 

founded in an atmosphere of great ideas and it is 
always refreshing when the endless round of de- 
tail becomes overwhelming, to get back into the 
atmosphere of those early educational discus- 
sions. I trust, therefore, that when you look in 
on the School of Pedagogy, while you may find it 
using its microscope with care and precision in 
the discovery of exact truth in its own domain, 
you will also find that the telescope has not been 
laid aside but that with its own present small 
share in scientific investigation go larger dreams 
and visions of the time when the School shall be 
not local but national and its knowledge and its 
helpfulness worldwide. 



304 



EDUCATION FOE BUSINESS 

ARCHBISHOP CHICELE, who founded All 
Souls' College at Oxford, made it a condi- 
tion of his gift that the Fellows of the College 
should forever care for his tomb at Canterbury- 
Cathedral. He died before the discovery of Amer- 
ica and no tomb is more likely to receive perennial 
care, in the future as in the past, than the tomb of 
the wise ecclesiastic who rested his faith in the 
permanency of a school. Mr. Haskins left the 
school, of which he was one of the principal 
founders, no building and no endowment, nor is 
the school bound by any deed of gift to cherish 
his memory. His bequest to the School of Com- 
merce, Accounts and Finance was an idea, and be- 
cause this idea has proved potent and fruitful 
beyond the most sanguine expectations, the stu- 
dents and friends of the School turn naturally to 
perpetuate his memory. The university authori- 
ties gladly accept the custody of this memorial, 
and wish me to express to those who have been 
instrumental in establishing it, their hearty ap- 
preciation of the thoughtfulness and generosity 
which have inscribed here the name of the first 
Dean, for coming generations of students to read 

Address at memorial services of Charles Waldo Haskins, Dean 
of the School of Commerce, New York University, 1910. 



Education for Business 

and revere. We trust that the bronze tablet un- 
veiled this evening will outlive the building in 
which it finds a temporary home, and have an 
.honored place in the statelier halls which the gen- 
erations will bring. 

It has been said that the first rule for success is 
to select the right grandfather. If you students 
and alumni of the School of Commerce have shown 
wisdom in selecting this School as your fostering 
mother, you may congratulate yourselves also that 
this fostering mother was the child of a man so 
clear in vision and so strong in faith as Mr. Has- 
kins. It was never my good fortune, like the other 
speakers of the evening, to know Mr. Haskins per- 
sonally. At the time the School was founded I 
was in the West, enjoying the wide perspective of 
the Missouri prairies. I recall, however, that 
when I joined my father in the Catskills in the 
summer of 1900, he outlined to me the plan of the 
School and we discussed together the name 
''Commerce, Accounts and Finance." For ten 
years, therefore, the name of Mr. Haskins has 
stood to my mind for an idea rather than for a 
personality; and as it is the idea as well as the 
man that we celebrate to-night, I leave to others 
the pleasant task of speaking of Mr. Haskins as a 
friend, and will say a brief word only regarding 
the idea for which his name stands. 

I was struck by the fact in that early conversa- 
tion with the Chancellor, that Mr. Haskins and 
his associates who proposed the organization of 
the new school were men more interested in sub- 

30O 



Education for Business 

stance than form. They did not begin with a 
name and then decide what the School was to do, 
but began with a concrete task and permitted the 
organization to assume a form adapted to the task. 
As I understand it, those who proposed the or- 
ganization of the School wanted first of all the 
help of an educational institution in creating and 
maintaining a new profession — the profession of 
Certified Public Accountant; and secondly, they 
wanted instruction which should widen the out- 
look of young business men, enrich their lives and 
fit them for the wider opportunities which modern 
industrial organization affords. I recall that the 
Chancellor said more than once that this School 
differed from all other university schools of busi- 
ness in that it had "as its backbone," as he ex- 
pressed it, the task of preparing men for a defin- 
ite profession, the profession of the accountant. 
Mr. Haskins saw ten years ago what the rest of 
the world has come to see more clearly since, that 
the intricacies of modern corporate organizations 
and the multiplying of governmental activities 
were destined to create a new profession or give a 
new significance to one already existing in a 
minor way. Mr. Haskins probably did not fore- 
see, nor could any one have foreseen at the time, 
the sudden growth of the demand on the part of 
the public for publicity of corporate affairs. He 
would have been an extraordinary prophet who 
could have predicted that this appetite, whetted 
by the gas and insurance investigations, would 
have become so insatiate in so short a time. 

307 



Education for Business 

Just as the great corporations have created a 
new jReld for lawyers, giving them an opportunity 
to apply their trained brains to knotty business 
questions and to show business men how the thing 
can be done which they want done, so the crea- 
tion of great corporations has created a new field 
for the man with expert financial knowledge, in 
interpreting to owners and stockholders and the 
public at large what it is that the corporation has 
done in carrying out the wishes of the business 
man in the way suggested by the lawyer, and 
what the result is in dollars and cents. Account- 
ing, as Mr. Haskins expressed it, is the conning 
tower of modern business. 

I am not gifted with prophetic insight and can- 
not foresee the future development of this pro- 
fession. From my own experience, however, with 
the work of certified public accountants in the cor- 
porations with which I am connected, I see clearly 
one thing — that the future of the profession will 
depend on the intellectual power and breadth of 
the men who compose it. It is a comparatively 
simple thing to train men to prepare a report of 
the financial affairs of this, that, or the other 
corporation, according to a formal routine laid 
down in the accountant's ofiice. It is a much more 
difficult thing to secure accountants who have had 
such preliminary training that they show the same 
analytical power possessed by a great corpora- 
tion lawyer, and are able to adapt their methods 
to the specific problems and necessities of the par- 
ticular corporation. No man of limited training 

308 



Education for Business 

can do this. It requires imagination to know 
what term to substitute for capital in a School 
like this which has no capital. It requires sagac- 
ity born of a wide experience and considerable 
reflection to pick out the important factors of a 
business and distinguish the essential points of 
view for the managers and for the stockholders 
from the unessential points. Accountancy as a 
profession has seemed too ready to give up the 
task of attempting to analyze corporation re- 
ports and certify to their accuracy, preferring the 
easier task of preparing a report of their own in 
accordance with fixed formulae, so reducing the 
risk of error in the report and minimizing the 
amount of intense analytical mental activity which 
the examiner must exercise. To let some one else 
do the thinking may make a profession safe ; it will 
never make it great. I see far enough ahead, 
therefore, to realize that Mr. Haskins has left us a 
larger task than we have yet been able to perform. 
In Mr. Haskins ' own words — ' ' so far we have just 
begun to approach the foot of the professional 
ladder. But as we look up and ask for further 
educational guidance, we realize that we have 
come to a lonesome place where few meet us, and 
these but newcomers and inquirers like ourselves." 
For one thing, I should like to see the School of 
Commerce provided with endowments, so that it 
could do what the new government commercial 
school of Japan does — limit the number of its 
students in accountancy to 200, selecting these as 
the best qualified from among a thousand appli- 

309 



Education for Business 

cants. I should like to see the course of study 
made so intensive and extensive, that the posses- 
sion of a degree from this School would be prima 
facie evidence that the man could do any of the 
tasks of an able Certified Public Accountant in a 
superior way. At the same time, I would not cut 
off the wider influence of the School, but would 
endeavor to carry out Mr. Haskins' second idea, 
of widening the outlook and improving the effi- 
ciency of young business men. 

Mr. Crane of Chicago has recently published a 
book to prove that America is all wrong, and that 
money spent on Higher Education is all wasted. 
He has given it the title, ''The Utility of All Kinds 
of Higher Schooling," but the fitter title would 
be, ''The Futility of All Higher Schooling." He 
is quite convinced that in the Crane shops he has 
a better university than Mr. Eockefeller's mil- 
lions can ever build. But even Mr. Crane seems 
to believe in books and the efficacy of the pen. 
One of the tasks of this school — a task for which 
Mr. Haskins himself pointed the way in his book 
on Business Education and Accounting — ^is and 
will continue to be, to describe business processes 
in scientific terms, to observe and classify and 
name the phenomena of modem business, so that 
the human mind may grasp them, discover their 
significance, and generalize regarding them. It is 
astonishing to find how little scientific knowledge 
we possess of the great business world which is all 
about us. That there exists here a fruitful field 
for university research was recognized even in the 

310 



Education for Business 

early days of this university, when provision was 
made in the original plan for a professorship of 
commerce. The task belongs preeminently to this 
school, because no place in the world offers so 
great opportunities for this study as this richest 
city in the world, itself an epitome of the world's 
business. 

As I have said, Mr. Haskins left no building and 
no endowment to the School he was instrumental 
in founding. He left, however, a fruitful idea, 
and unless the history of the world in this genera- 
tion is to differ from the history of the world in 
all other generations, this idea must eventually 
clothe herself with a home and with material sub- 
stance. The record of the endowments of the 
University of Cambridge, England, shows that 
back in medieval days it was not uncommon for 
money to be left to the colleges and along with the 
money a chest to keep the money in. The chests 
outlasted the money, but none of them, unfortu- 
nately, developed the quality of the widow's barrel, 
and the money taken from the chest did not re- 
turn. We trust that we shall not have to wait 
long for the adequate housing of the work of the 
School of Commerce, but better that we should 
have a fruitful, multiplying idea, which at the end 
of ten years cries for more room, than that we 
should find ourselves at this time the possessors 
of an empty shell, its golden store all spent. It 
is, therefore, with sincere appreciation that the 
university joins in paying tribute to Mr. Has- 
kins and his large part in the establishment of 

311 



Education for Business 

this School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance; 
and as we recall the first Dean, we think of his 
ideal of perfect accountancy: ''forethought, 
friendliness, artful getting at things, fire of rea- 
son, mathematical accuracy, adherence to truth." 



Si-i 



A GRADUATE SCHOOL FOR THE 
METROPOLIS 

THE dedication of the splendid dormitories 
and dining-hall of the Graduate School of 
Princeton, on a site entirely distinct from the site 
of the undergraduate college, has focused attention 
anew on this aspect of university work in Amer- 
ica, and has so objectified ideas long current 
among American universities, that even the public 
at large is beginning to inquire as to the nature 
and aim of graduate work. The public has been 
familiar for some time with the Ph.D. and his 
peculiarities, has joined more or less seriously in 
the discussion as to his availability for practical 
life, and has hesitated between an attitude of ad- 
miration and of ridicule. The teacher in all 
grades, however, has discovered that the degree 
has at' least money value, and an ever increasing 
number are seeking it as a practical means of ad- 
vancement in their profession. Recent statistics 
published in ' ' Science ' ^ show that in the last six- 
teen years the degree of Doctor of Philosophy or 
Doctor of Science has been secured by 5,237 per- 
sons in forty-four American universities, besides 
all of those who have secured the degree abroad. 
Of this number, 461 were given in 1913. If the 
same proportion holds for the other institutions 

313 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

as for New York University between the number 
of students in the Graduate School and the num- 
ber attaining to the highest degree, we should not 
be far wrong in placing the number of graduate 
students this year at 10,000. Dr. Oilman, first 
president of Johns Hopkins University, has told 
very graphically the difficulty he had when he 
graduated from college, of finding any opportunity 
in America to pursue advanced studies in the sub- 
ject in which he was interested. In the first half 
of the nineteenth century, there were a good many 
college professors in America who knew a great 
deal more than they had opportunity to teach 
their students, but there was little or no systematic 
provision for giving this instruction to the excep- 
tional student who wanted it. The result was 
that our most ambitious young men necessarily 
went abroad to study, and few student lists are 
more interesting or significant than the list of 
young Americans who studied at German univer- 
sities in the first half of the last century, from 
Henry W. Longfellow to J. Pierpont Morgan. 

When the foundation of New York University 
was under discussion in this city in 1829, one of 
the arguments used for its establishment was that 
it ought to be possible to find in America the 
knowledge which at that time could only be found 
abroad. At the conference which met in New 
York City in 1830 to discuss the aim and methods 
of university instruction, papers were presented 
that discussed university education not only in 
England, Scotland and Ireland, but in Germany, 

314 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

France, Switzerland and Spain. As a result of 
the discussions at this convention, the ideas of 
the founders of this university were broadened, 
and whereas the earlier argument for the estab- 
lishment of the university laid stress upon extend- 
ing to every boy opportunity to pursue the ac- 
quisition of knowledge in any department of liter- 
ature or science, according to his own preference 
or that of this parents or guardian, free from the 
control of any sect either in religion, politics or 
education, the later appeals laid emphasis as well 
on what we should now know as graduate instruc- 
tion. Thus in the memorial addressed to the 
Legislature of the State of New York, unanimously 
adopted by the University Council, when apply- 
ing for a charter in 1831, it was stated : 

''An anxiety has long been entertained by men 
of letters, that a seminary should be furnished 
by this country, presenting the same advantages 
for a finished education which are enjoyed in the 
great universities of Europe. The attempts here- 
tofore made have undoubtedly been attended with 
some degree of success and encouragement, but 
no institution of the kind has yet risen to great 
preeminence. Your petitioners are aware of the 
impediments to any immediate or great success in 
such undertakings, arising out of the commercial 
character of our citizens, the small number of 
those who make letters a profession, and the dis- 
ability of such institutions under the laws as they 
exist with us, to introduce their graduates into 
the learned professions. Your petitioners, how- 

315 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

ever, are persuaded that the City of New York 
affords advantages which give greater assurance 
of success in this respect, than can at present be 
looked for in any other part of the country. In- 
dependent of the numbers who may be expected 
out of 213,000 inhabitants to avail themselves of a 
course of instruction in the highest departments of 
learning, the position of the city is most advan- 
tageously adapted to attract students and men of 
letters from other states and from abroad to an 
institution of this character. This city will always 
offer opportunities for men of science, whilst pur- 
suing their studies at the university, at the same 
time to obtain profitable employments as instruc- 
tors, writers, or otherwise, thus securing an im- 
mediate profitable recompense for the time and ex- 
pense devoted to their own improvement. Your 
petitioners can speak with no precision upon this 
subject, but if they may be allowed to draw con- 
clusions from a consideration of circumstances 
commonly connected with a university course of 
instruction, they would feel great confidence in 
the anticipation that this department would be 
speedily filled, and that it would dispense blessings 
of inestimable magnitude to all parts of our com- 
mon country." 

The fourfold division made by the founders of 
the university in 1831, into first what we know 
as the regular college course; second, college ex- 
tension, "where persons of various ages and de- 
grees of preparation may connect themselves with 
the university, may pursue at their election any 

316 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

branch of study taught there, so that the mechanic 
can obtain for his son who is destined to continue 
his calling an opportunity of learning what the 
sciences have discovered in aid of his business, 
and so that young men may go from the halls of 
the university to the counting-house with the con- 
viction that everything they have learned will be 
of ready and useful application in the business for 
which they are preparing themselves, so that 
crowds of youths will acquire and carry with them 
into their various employments a just appreciation 
of learning in its application to the business and 
enjoyment of life"; third, the professional schools, 
law, medicine, etc.; and fourth, the graduate 
schools and research, — is a division which can 
hardly be improved upon to-day. 

A Graduate School for New York, as thus con- 
ceived by the founders of the university, differs 
somewhat from the ideal of a Graduate School 
which has found expression at Princeton. The 
Princeton Graduate School will be the child of the 
English university, while the New York Gradu- 
ate School will be rather the child of the German 
university. The Princeton Graduate School in 
the first place lays stress on the home for the stu- 
dents; the buildings to be first erected are resi- 
dence halls and a dining-hall where all may eat 
together. The location is a beautiful, healthful 
one, because of the high ground on which it stands, 
and opportunity for golf and tennis is immediately 
at hand. The new Graduate College is a beauti- 
ful home, but for the present at least it is some- 

317 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

what at a disadvantage as a workshop, because it 
is over half a mile from library, laboratory, or 
recitation room. Of the money which the student 
of the Princeton Graduate School pays to the uni- 
versity, $300 or more goes to the expense of food 
and shelter, while only $15 or $25 goes to the 
expense of instruction. The Princeton idea, like 
the Oxford idea, is the man as a man first, as a 
student second. The Princeton ideal is rather the 
ideal of living with knowledge, particularly the 
knowledge which is the accumulation of past ages, 
than the creation of new knowledge in a laboratory 
or at the forge. The Princeton Graduate School, 
as stated by Dean West in his address last week, 
aims to correct certain defects in graduate stu- 
dies that now exist elsewhere, namely the wor- 
ship of degrees, the estrangement of special knowl- 
edge from general knowledge, the lack of care 
for the physical well-being of students, and the 
lack of adjustment of students to future occupa- 
tions. The object of having the men live together 
in a separate institution is, according to Presi- 
dent Hibben, to provide human intercourse, not 
to exclude it; and if the manner of life produces, 
as Dean West hopes and as I believe he has a 
right to hope, men companionable, magnanimous 
and free, who recognize that in learning is one 
of the great pleasures of life, it will have justified 
its existence. 

And yet, as a result of the discussion which has 
raged about the founding of this new school, even 
the advocates of the home idea themselves have 

318 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

felt that the ideal of the life according to reason, 
which might have satisfied the Stoic philosopher, 
would not satisfy the Christianized conscience of 
the America of to-day ; and curiously enough, this 
fact has found physical expression in the addition 
to the residence halls of the Cleveland Tower, 
built on broader proportions, dominating — some- 
what dwarfing the earthclinging quadrangle, and 
symbolizing service to the community. 

One effect of the establishment of the new 
Graduate School at Princeton has been to give a 
new front to the property of the Princeton Theo- 
logical Seminary, and as you walk past the Semi- 
nary to the Graduate School, the question natu- 
rally suggests itself : in what respect is the Gradu- 
ate School to be different from the Theological 
Seminary? For years the Seminary has been the 
home of students of the same scholastic grade, 
namely, graduates of an undergraduate college, 
as the new Graduate School is to accommodate. 
As in the case of the new Graduate School, it has 
seemed to the friends of the theological students 
that a comfortable home was of the essence of a 
theological seminary, and churches all over the 
country have taken an interest in the Theological 
Seminary as have the friends of the Graduate 
Scnool, in furnishing the rooms, even to the sheets 
on the beds. The Seminary has been a company 
of students, free from worldly cares and avoca- 
tions, enjoying many of them, like the scholars of 
the Graduate College, the aid of endowed scholar- 
ships. They have given three years — approxi- 

319 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

mately the same time as will be given by the stu- 
dents of the Graduate School — to advanced study, 
mostly in languages, and to familiarizing them- 
selves with great writers of the past. What is it 
then that makes the Graduate School new and 
modern, while the Theological Seminary is old, 
and some would say out-of-date? The first obvi- 
ous distinction is, that one is a professional school, 
which has definite future work in view. The 
Graduate School will try to keep professionalism 
outside its gates, welcoming knowledge only be- 
cause it is knowledge, searching out truth for the 
sake of truth and not as a gospel for human wel- 
fare. And yet even Dean West expects the studies 
to be adjusted to the future occupations of the 
students. Perhaps after all, then, we shall find 
that the Graduate School is not so different from 
the Theological Seminary as we had at first sup- 
posed, and that it but illustrates the differentia- 
tion that has come in the teaching which was all 
performed by the dominie in the early days, when 
John Knox gave to every parish a school-house, 
but which has shared the expansion which the 
twentieth century has brought to the field of knowl- 
edge itself. 

The Graduate School which the founders of New 
York University had in mind for this city, when its 
population numbered 213,000, and which it is the 
ideal of the university still to create when the 
city's population numbers 5,000,000, is of a some- 
what different order. It is as I have said the child 
of the German university rather than the child of 

320 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

the English university. It does not begin with the 
idea of the home. Practically no dormitory foun- 
dations have been provided for German university 
students, except for theological students. This is 
not because it would not be desirable to have com- 
fortable homes for the students, but because the 
universities have been concerned with what from 
the university point of view is more important. 
Nor has the University of Paris approached the 
subject of university instruction from the stand- 
point of a home for students. As was stated at 
Princeton last week, the University of Paris was 
originally a residence college, but that was in the 
days when it was a church institution, and shared 
the provision which the Church made for its 
orders. At the present time, the Latin Quarter 
is probably more famous than the University of 
Paris; but Kke Boston, the Latin Quarter is 
rather a state of mind than a physical habitation. 
The German and French idea of the university 
may be said to begin and end with the individual 
university professor; and if we are to have a 
Graduate School in New York, which is to be what 
the founders of 1830 expected it to be, we must 
begin at that end of the problem. It is the appre- 
ciation of this fact that has made Harvard great 
in graduate work. When confronted with the al- 
ternative between a respectable man or a man 
whose eccentricity may prove to be either genius 
or failure, it has risked the failure in the hope of 
securing a possible genius. The fame of Harvard 
rests rather on Kittredge and Eoyce than on 

321 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

Conant and Eandall. To solve the problem of the 
greatest Graduate School for the City of New 
York, is only to solve the problem of securing and 
holding the twenty greatest experts in twenty sub- 
jects, who add to a national reputation rugged 
character and reasonable teaching ability. The 
only thing that will make men study in New York 
rather than Berlin, will be the fact that the New 
York professor is reputed the greater authority 
than the Berlin professor. When you go to Ger- 
many and are told that the best book on Psychol- 
ogy is that written by William James of Boston, 
it reverses the tide of graduate students. When 
you go to Vienna and are told that the best instru- 
ments for throat manipulation are those in use in 
New York, it reverses the tide of graduate stu- 
dents. It will not do it all at once, because you 
will remember that William James himself 
studied in Germany, and that the physicians who 
invented the instruments studied in Germany, so 
that a generation will be required for the rule to 
work itself out ; and there will always remain truth 
in the saying: 

''How much the goose who has been sent to roam 
Excels the goose who always stays at home." 

The best graduate student is the one who is not 
content with second-hand goods ; it is the one who 
is dissatisfied until he has traced knowledge to its 
fountain head, has seen for himself those things 
which rest upon seeing, and has heard for himself 
those things which rest upon authority. So long, 

322 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

therefore, as Ms teachers cite foreign authorities 
as the conclusive word in the agrument, he will 
look to the foreign authorities as the fountain head 
of knowledge. This axiom — that the first, last and 
only task of the university administrator who 
would make a great graduate school is to find and 
keep the right professors, has been given prac- 
tical application in America in more than one in- 
stance. It governed the formation of the first 
faculty at Johns Hopkins. It was the newest and 
most notable thing in the inauguration of Chicago 
University, that it tempted with salaries of $7,000 
— at that time unheard of in university circles — 
teachers of national prominence to throw in their 
lot with the new institution. The history of these 
institutions, however, shows that the problem is 
not as simple a one as might be supposed. The 
authority of to-day is not the authority of to- 
morrow. The achievements of the young make the 
fame of yesterday the empty pretense of to-day, 
and the university has no method of scrappitig its 
out-of-date machinery, as the factory and street 
railway have. The establishment of the Carnegie 
Pension Fund has somewhat accelerated the pro- 
cess, but even with that fund in existence, the uni- 
versity administration must face the fact that in 
selecting a professor it is entering into a connec- 
tion more indissoluble even than the marriage tie 
in these days, and that the chair of Greek, Latin 
or English, once filled, is filled for better or worse 
once for all, so far as the present generation is 
concerned. It was Dr. James McCosh, I believe, 

323 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

who said of college professors that few died and 
none resigned. It is right that university pro- 
fessors should enjoy this security of tenure. Uni- 
versities are, of all philanthropies, the most long 
lived, and they can afford, therefore, to use 
longer units in measuring their efficiency than 
more ephemeral institutions. But because of this 
security of tenure, all the professorships of the 
new foundation should not be filled at once, with 
the result that the faculty grow old together. A 
graduate school which is to maintain its reputa- 
tion and authority must grow like a palm, not like 
a watermelon. Its life will be manifested by fresh 
new shoots overtopping the old, not only by the 
swelling girth and mellowness of its choicest fruit. 
If some one were to give me to-morrow, without 
restriction, a sum equal to that at the disposal of 
Princeton for its graduate school, namely three 
million dollars, to build a graduate school for New 
York University, I would set apart the entire 
amount for the permanent endowment of profes- 
sorships, and would devote every cent of the in- 
come to the salaries of instructors and investi- 
gators. It would be a good thing to have resi- 
dence halls for graduate students, but it would not 
be essential for the efficiency of such a graduate 
school as I have in mind. With $150,000 a year 
to devote to professors' salaries, we could make 
of the whole Washington Square section of this 
city a Latin Quarter. We could make the Gradu- 
ate School not national but international, and draw 
our students from every nation of the globe. In 

324 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

this way we should hope not so much to mold the 
lives of individuals as to mold the destinies of 
nations, to a greater extent even than was dreamed 
of by Cecil Rhodes. We have seen the last year 
the effect of American teaching in the Balkans and 
in China. It is to make a great difference in the 
history of future civilization, whether the young 
men of the Orient study in America or in Ger- 
many, just as it will make a great difference to 
America, whether the young men who are to shape 
its thought study in Germany, in France, or in 
England. As the nations of the world turn from 
physical force to reason as the determining factor 
in progress, the significance of the dominant uni- 
versities is to be greater even than it has been in 
the past. Just as Germany selected a university 
as the best instrument for turning Alsace from a 
French province into a German province, just as 
our churches are coming to recognize that in the 
Orient it is the schools which are to cast the deter- 
mining vote between the religions of different peo- 
ples; so in the determination of which type of 
civilization is to survive, as the nations of the 
world are brought into closer and closer relation, 
the civilization which holds the key to the uni- 
versities will command the battle-ground. The 
reason such great results might be anticipated 
from the expenditure of such a sum of money for 
this purpose in New York is not because New York 
produces wiser or abler men than other localities, 
but because it is the metropolis of the New World, 
its financial and social capital, and, therefore, an 

325 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

irresistible magnet for the more ambitious. The 
very instinct which makes the best graduate stu- 
dent — namely, to be content with nothing less than 
the best — would operate to bring these best stu- 
dents to New York, provided the greatest teachers 
of the country were to be found here. 

New York ought to have endowed professor- 
ships, which in the amount of salary as compared 
with the amount of salary in other cities, would be 
proportionate to the amount New York spends for 
other things compared with what other cities 
spend. As I pointed out in my last annual report, 
we ought to have endowed research professor- 
ships in medicine, paying at least $10,000 a year, 
comparing in dignity and in opportunities for 
service with the bishoprics of churches. We 
ought to have professorships in other depart- 
ments, which would yield something more than the 
average standard of living of the professorial 
grade. The benefit of such liberal foundations 
would not be confined to the individual holder. It 
is a well-known fact that what draws talent into 
a profession is not the average reward, but the 
existence of great prizes which may be obtained 
by the exceptional few. Thus in the hearings 
held by the Royal Commission on the University 
of London, Dr. Edouard Rist of Paris gave it as 
his opinion that the reason why smaller German 
universities — Marburg, Erlangen and Wurtzburg 
— can command the services of able young men 
as teachers of medicine, is that when a man has 
worked a few years at Marburg or Erlangen, if he 

326 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

is successful he is quite sure to go to Munich, Ber- 
lin or Vienna, to become one of the glories of the 
day. Thus the effect of the great prizes of the 
metropolis is felt to the most remote corner of the 
educational system. Nor is the benefit enjoyed by 
the provincial university a temporary one. Often 
the freedom from distraction of the smaller uni- 
versity gives a great teacher such great scientific 
satisfaction that men of world-wide reputation 
remain in the small university, resisting all at- 
tempts to remove them to the larger cities, like 
Erb at Heidelberg, Kollisker at Wurtzburg, or 
Behring at Marburg. No New Yorker need hesi- 
tate, therefore, to set up great foundations in New 
York, for fear of weakening other parts of our 
educational system. The benefit of such great 
prizes would not be confined to New York, but 
would strengthen the profession of teaching, wher- 
ever found. 

The business men of New York are perhaps too 
much inclined to think of New York in relation to 
universities, as they think of it in relation to their 
great business corporations, as a good place for 
a central office, like the Carnegie Foundation, 
Presbyterian College Board, or the General Edu- 
cation Board, but a poor place for a factory or a 
home. This feeling is increased by the fact that 
so large a proportion of the successful men of New 
York have come to it from outside, and their 
stronger affections center around the home of their 
youth, whether it be Ohio, Massachusetts, Ken- 
tucky, Canada, Scotland, or Germany; so that 

327 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

when they come to make great gifts, they prefer 
to build in the peaceful atmosphere of home 
rather than on the battlefield. No city, however, 
can be truly great which does not provide a place 
for the greatest living teachers. If it is true that 
no prophet can perish outside of Jerusalem, it is 
equally true that Jerusalem cannot continue to ex- 
ist without its prophets. It is only a superficial 
view that thinks of a great city as no place for 
study. There is no solitude like that of a great 
city. As a man said to me last week, he never 
knew what study was until he saw the students of 
Paris, who thought nothing when absorbed in their 
subject of studying the whole night through, with 
no thought of sleep. Great research institutions, 
like the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Rocke- 
feller Institute in New York, having no students 
do not require large populations, yet take their 
place by preference in the large cities. So the 
university in the large city must necessarily find 
inspiration in the intensity and vigor of city life, 
and here alone can it find a sufficiently complex 
civilization to warrant the high degree of special- 
ization which modem scholarship demands. Chi- 
cago, St. Louis, Nashville, Denver, San Francisco, 
and almost every town of ten thousand people in 
our great West, has thought of a great school as a 
great civic asset. Even the citizens of Brooklyn 
have recently turned to the idea of a university as 
a way to magnify their place in the great metropo- 
lis. The King of England has appointed succes- 
sive commissions to take testimony and determine 

328 



A Graduate School for the Metropolis 

how the University of London, which was born of 
the same university movement as New York Uni- 
versity and four years after New York University, 
may be raised to the position of a truly imperial 
university. There does not exist as yet in our 
city, as a whole, any such civic consciousness of 
the importance of securing for New York a pre- 
eminent place in the world of learning; and New 
York is so big and its population so new and ever 
renewing itself, that it is almost impossible to 
create or to crystallize any such sentiment. But 
as New York University was created in the first 
instance by a small group of men, with the cooper- 
ation of a small group in the New York Historical 
Society and in the Lyceum of Natural Sciences; 
and as the great Princeton Graduate College is 
not the work of any considerable number but 
only of a bare half dozen persons, so we may ex- 
pect that it will be the courage and generosity 
of some single individual, or at most of not more 
than half a dozen, who will lift New York to the 
commanding position which she ought to occupy in 
the world of learning. 



329 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THERAPEUTIC 
IMPULSE 

THE university welcomes you to the study of 
medicine and the unlimited possibilities 
which the field of medical science affords at the 
present day. You are beginning a course of 
study which is the most exacting and arduous of 
any offered by any part of the university. In the 
number of hours required and in the intensity of 
application, the medical curriculum surpasses all 
others. When once embarked in medical study, 
you will have little time for reflection on the gen- 
eral problems of your professional life. The time 
for reflection will come later when you sit in your 
offices awaiting the arrival of patients. I may, 
perhaps, therefore, as one outside the profession, 
on this opening day, venture to make two sugges- 
tions. 

Those of us who have been studying the prob- 
lems of medical education created by the recent 
developments in scientific medicine and the intro- 
duction of laboratory methods, recognize as one 
of the serious problems of to-day the coordination 
of laboratory and clinic. From the standpoint of 
university administration, the problem is how to 
differentiate laboratory investigation and re- 



Address to the first year class of the University and Bellevue 
Hospital Medical College, New York City, October, 1910. 



Scientific Method and Therapeutic Impulse 

search, which, directly or indirectly, contribute to 
the art of healing, from laboratory research, which 
sets no bounds to its search for truth and treats 
facts as in themselves valuable. The problem is 
difficult because it is hard to see in advance what 
investigations will yield facts which will have 
practical value. There is a disposition on the part 
of scientists, therefore, to say that research and 
investigation must be unrestricted. The physi- 
cian, on the other hand, is interested in a concrete 
problem and makes his most valuable contribution 
to the advance of medical science when he formu- 
lates his problem clearly and asks the laboratory 
scientists for an answer. When the clinicians are 
apt at stating a problem and when their faith is 
increased so that they regard it as reasonable to 
expect the medical science of to-day to solve prob- 
lems which it has never solved before, the two 
branches of medical education will fall into proper 
correlation. They are somewhat disorganized at 
present because the laboratory men are in large 
measure both formulating the problems and an- 
swering them. 

As relates to you students, the problem of labor- 
atory and clinic takes the form of an inquiry as to 
how the therapeutic impulse and the desire to cure 
your fellow men of their ills may be kept warm 
and unchilled throughout a long course of scien- 
tific study. It has been a maxim of modern 
science that the true student and the true lover 
of truth must, so far as possible, divorce his in- 
tellect from emotion. In some way, he must dis- 

331 



Scientific Method and Therapeutic Impulse 

connect his perceptions from hopes and fears and 
from the normal reactions which attach values to 
ideas. Just as it has always been true that a 
surgeon too greatly concerned for his patient's 
pains does not perform the best operation, so, to 
a greater extreme (has it been insisted by the 
scientist), is the seeker after truth handicapped if 
his observation is accompanied by interest in a 
practical problem or concern as to the life or death 
of a patient. In the first place, therefore, while I 
would urge you to acquire the scientific habit of 
mind, which discriminates clearly between what it 
sees and does not see, what is definitely known 
and what is not definitely known, what can be ac- 
curately weighed, and measured, and tested by 
chemical reactions, and what is of necessity 
hypothetical, — I would, at the same time, urge you 
to nourish within you as a sacred flame what I 
have called the therapeutic impulse, the desire to 
heal and to do good to the whole man. 

This carries with it a corollary which is the 
second suggestion I would urge on you at this 
time, and that is throughout all your dealing with 
facts and tissues and chemical elements, to re- 
member that, after all, you will find yourselves 
called to minister not to tissues or bones as such, 
unless some of you are so unfortunate as to be 
made coroners and to find autopsies an important 
part of your profession, but you will be called to 
minister to living men who are not, as the old 
psychology would have us believe, bodies with a 
soul placed inside of them, or souls temporarily 

332 



Scientific Method and Therapeutic Impulse 

hampered by a somewhat troublesome body, but 
who are a unity in their being, manifesting their 
life in both physiological and psychological phe- 
nomena. For this reason, the physician who en- 
ters upon his practice in the spirit in which he 
would begin work in a morgue, is only half 
equipped. You will find that in addition to your 
scientific knowledge, personality will count for 
much in practice. Do not throw away, therefore, 
during your course any vitality or strength of 
personality which you may possess, but on the 
contrary, seek to strengthen in every way possible 
those moral fibers which go to make up what we 
call character and which you will find a valuable 
asset in healing. A great man is not necessarily 
a great physician, but you will find it hard to 
discover an eminent medical career which had not 
the backing of strong manhood. 

The university this summer, at a cost of about 
$120,000, has increased the facilities for labora- 
tory research and instruction and we have large 
plans for further improvements which may, I 
trust, sometime see fulfillment. I do not feel, how- 
ever, that the university will be doing its full 
duty in the matter of medical education until it is 
able also to provide a suitable place of residence 
for students from a distance and to do its part 
toward making its men not only well informed ac- 
cording to the latest scientific methods, but strong 
and well equipped on all sides of their person- 
alities so that they may carry with them in the 
personal contact which their profession requires, 

333 



Scientific Method and Therapeutic Impulse 

strength and healing for both mind and body. 
I congratulate you upon entering this college at 
a time when it is better equipped than ever before, 
both in instructors and plant, to give the best 
medical education. I congratulate you on coming 
to this college better prepared in point of pre- 
liminary education than any class which has en- 
tered in the past. I congratulate you on your 
Dean — a man whose hearty interest in your wel- 
fare is as big and broad, as strong and kindly, as 
his corporal presence. I congratulate you on be- 
ginning your first year 's work under such a master 
of his art as the new head of the Department of 
Anatomy, Professor Senior. I congratulate you 
upon entering upon the study of medicine at a 
time of stress and controversy; at a time when 
medical education is being subjected to investiga- 
tion and criticism ; when it is being attacked within 
by its friends and assailed from without by its 
foes ; when animal experimentation, the very basis 
of modern medical science, is being misrepresented 
and misrated; when the profession Avhich has re- 
tained preeminently the professional spirit of 
service and which is probably the freest as a whole 
of any body of men from the spirit of greed and 
personal aggrandizement, is attacked as a trust, — 
for unjust and harmful as are these attacks, they 
will raise up friends as well as foes. They will 
direct public attention to a subject which has been 
too long ignored. They will mean a burning away 
of dead tissue and new life and vigor, and, as it 
is said that more male children are born to a 

334 



Scientific Method and Therapeutic Impulse 

nation in time of war, so doubtless will these times 
of stress and criticism send forth from this uni- 
versity more than the average number of men of 
marked strength. 

There is enough of the fire of battle in the air, 
enough of the romance of discovery in the labora- 
tories about us, to stir the pulses and kindle the 
eyes, I am sure, of every one of you. On behalf 
of the university, I wish you success. 



335 



FRATERNITY IDEALS 

TO one who left the chapter almost eighteen 
years ago, the Delta seems more at home in 
this neighborhood than in the strange fields in 
which it has lately wandered. If you were to seek 
the center of the triangle formed by the three loca- 
tions of the Delta — on Broadway, University 
Place and Eleventh Street, and South Washington 
Square — you would find that the committee on 
this reunion had fixed on a very fair compromise. 

The active men of the chapter of that day are 
widely scattered. Brother Adams, who acted as 
my guide to the first meeting of the Delta which 
I attended, is in Syria. Brother Frost, in whose 
charge I was placed as an initiate, is or was in 
Shanghai, China. Last month I had a letter from 
him, saying that probably it would be necessary 
for him to discontinue the practice of law in the 
United States Court at Shanghai, because the revo- 
lutionists had left no court to practice in. As 
spectacular evidence of the overthrow of the gov- 
ernment, he enclosed a banknote of the old regime, 
which he said was one of many hundreds thrown 
out on the streets, without value. 

It is rather an age of overhauling and upturn- 
ing, of stock-taking, surveys and estimates, and 



Address to graduates of Delta Chapter of the Psi Upsilon Fra- 
ternity, 1912. 



/ 



Fraternity Ideals 

fraternities have come in for their share of the 
general investigation. The most notable critical 
examination of fraternities is that of Mr. Birds- 
eye in his book on ' '■ The American College. ' ' You 
may have noticed that last week a committee re- 
ported on high school fraternities, stating that 
whatover might be the merits of the system in 
colleges, fraternities were an unmitigated evil in 
high schools. Even the university which sought 
to avoid the problems of fraternities by banishing 
them from the campus, has had a battle lost and a 
battle won over the question of eating clubs or 
near-fraternities. A notable serial is now run- 
ning in one of our leading magazines, in which the 
discussion centers about the effect of the society 
system at another leading university upon the 
manhood of the students. 

Along with criticism has gone a great deal of 
self-examination. I received last month a request 
from a general officer of the Zeta Psi Fraternity 
for a report upon the scholastic standing of the 
members of their local chapter. President Schur- 
man of Cornell announced at the beginning of the 
semester this month, that he would hereafter at 
the beginning of each term make public a list, 
giving the relative rating of fraternities in point 
of scholarship. The President of Harvard Uni- 
versity has taken the lead in propounding the ques- 
tion of how to secure the interest in the things of 
the mind for which the college properly stands, 
and a great deal of thought is being given to the 
answer to the question by college officers at the 

337 



Fraternity Ideals 

present day. As yet we have reached no agree- 
ment as to a definition of liberal education, but I 
think we are all gradually coming to the conclu- 
sion that liberal education, as some one has ex- 
pressed it, does not consist in being able to read 
a speedometer and write a check. 

There are certain hopeful signs of the times. 
The establishment of the Elizabethan Club at Yale 
by Alexander Smith Cochran by the gift of 
several hundred thousand dollars, in order that 
there may be a place at that university where an 
interest in things literary may seem normal and 
not the eccentricity of a grind; the aims and 
methods of our own Andiron Club, and other 
similar organizations throughout the country, in- 
dicate that there will be a renewal of brotherhoods 
in which a common intellectual interest is the 
bond of union. The monogram of the City Club 
of this city is made up of a small c inside of a 
large C. The Club, they say, is divided into two 
parties ; those who say the large C stands for City 
and the small c for club, and those who say the 
large C stands for Club and the small c for city. 
We are all agreed that the U of Psi TJ. stands for 
Union, but some would interpret the Psi as stand- 
ing for supper, the union being based entirely on 
social tastes ; while others conceive that it was in 
the minds of the authors of our noble liturgy that 
there should be also union in the finer things of 
the spirit. 

I trust our fraternities will never become pri- 
marily eating clubs. In our old days we dined 

338 



Fraternity Ideals 

together but rarely, and I doubt if any subsequent 
class of Psi U's ever became more closely knit 
than were the Psi U's of '94. The Delta was one 
of the first Greek Letter chapters of the country 
to be made the beneficiary of a legacy and the good 
example of Ogden Butler was followed by Brother 
Webb last year. I trust the custom may grow, 
and lest any of you should feel that when the 
House is free of debt the only bequests acceptable 
will be fine paintings and table services of gold 
and silver, I want to suggest that the way is open 
to endow teaching fellowships in connection with 
the Chapter. I cannot, of course, speak for the 
Council or Faculty, but I feel confident that a plan 
might be worked out to the mutual advantage of 
the College and Chapter, by which if the Chapter 
fell heir to $10,000 or $20,000, it would nominate 
to the university a Psi U alumnus as a teaching 
fellow, who should be appointed by the university 
as a member of the Faculty, but who should be 
paid by the fraternity, live in the Fraternity 
House for one or two years, and represent in the 
life of the fraternity the scholastic side of college 
life. The stipend should not be so large as to 
make the financial inducement a primary one, be- 
cause the success of the plan would depend on 
securing a man with an irrepressible thirst for 
knowledge, and the kind of effulgent character 
which disseminates an interest in things intellec- 
tual as naturally and irresistibly as some other one 
whistles "rag." 
Mr. Birdseye in his book has insisted that the 
339 



Fraternity Ideals 

fraternity shall be regarded as the home of the 
student, while the college is regarded as his place 
of business. If, however, we are to produce our 
share of great scholars and thinkers in America, 
our share of the great poets, authors and scien- 
tists, we must return to the older idea of the col- 
lege as the common home of the students. To 
my mind, it is carrying the doctrine of specializa- 
tion too far to make fraternities exclusively social 
organizations. The fruit of such a theory of 
fraternity was shown at the last convention of our 
fraternity in this city, when no subject on the long 
list of toasts carried any hint that the fraternity 
was in any way connected with an institution of 
learning, or set any store by the increase or diffu- 
sion of knowledge. 



340 



DEDICATION OF BAKEE HALL 

IT is my agreeable duty, Mr. Chairman, to report 
on behalf of the building conamittee the comple- 
tion of the Cornelius Baker Hall of Philosophy. 
Mrs. Kennedy's generous offer was first an- 
nounced to the council of the university by the 
Chancellor Emeritus, at a special meeting held 
May 13th, 1912. The council at once accepted the 
offer, and entrusted the erection of the building 
to the building committee of four, one of whom — 
the late William F. Havemeyer — was removed by 
death after the award of the contracts, but before 
the completion of the building. The committee 
was fortunate in securing as architect Mr. Wilham 
D. Crow, of the firm Crow, Lewis & Wickenhoef er, 
who had been associated with Mr. Stanford White 
in the erection of Language Hall and the Library ; 
and who was, therefore, thoroughly familiar both 
with the general scheme for the quadrangle, as 
conceived by Stanford White, and also with the 
details of construction of Language Hall, of which 
it was intended the Hall of Philosophy should be, 
architecturally, a reproduction. The committee 
were also glad to avail themselves of the offer of 
the firm of McKim, Mead & White, to act as con- 
Address at dedication of the Cornelius Baker Hall of Philos- 
ophy, New York University, University Heights, New York City, 
October, 1914. 



Dedication of Baker Hall 

suiting architects. Plans were matured during 
the summer; and on November 6th, 1912, not quite 
two years ago, the general contract for construc- 
tion was awarded to the E. E. Paul Company, who 
have again earned the gratitude of the university 
for the careful and workmanhke manner in which 
the present contract has been carried out. Work 
progressed rapidly, and we confidently hoped the 
building would be finished within a year, and that 
these exercises of dedication might have been held 
in November, 1913. The spring floods of 1913 in 
Ohio, however, destroyed the factory which held 
the contract for the roof-tile, and caused a delay 
of six months in the execution of the order, the 
tile not being obtainable elsewhere in the United 
States. The building in the meantime was fitted 
with a temporary roof, which permitted its use 
by classes ; and the tile having finally been secured, 
the building was completed, accepted by the com- 
mittee, and the final payments made on May 25th, 
1914. Owing to the absence of the donor in 
Europe, the dedication, however, has been de- 
ferred until this time. The donor's original offer 
was to provide the cost of the building, not to 
exceed $90,000. The committee is glad to be able 
to report that the building is completed for the 
sum of $90,042.45. This includes the cost of light- 
ing, fixtures, and steam main connections ; but does 
not include any heating plant or dynamos, the 
building being connected with the university heat- 
ing and lighting system already installed, nor 
the cost of excavation, nor the foundations — which 

342 



Dedication of Baker Hall 

were put in place at the time of the erection of 
the Library some years since. On Thanksgiving 
Day, 1912, when the contract prices and estimates 
for the new building were reported to the donor, 
Mrs. Kennedy most generously offered to add to 
her original gift $5,000 for furniture, and $10,000 
conditioned on securing $20,000 for the completion 
of that section of the colonnade of the Hall of 
Fame adjoining the Hall of Philosophy, in order 
that the work might, if possible, be carried on at 
the same time as the erection of this building. 
Gifts were later secured to meet Mrs. Kennedy's 
conditional offer ; and our guests to-day are invited 
not only to inspect this building, but also to inspect 
the colonnade about the quadrant, which serves as 
a frame to enhance the picture. The Hall of Phil- 
osophy thus completes a group of educational 
buildings which is generally conceded to form 
one of the notable creations of American collegiate 
architecture. You will see that the building is 
severely plain, in accordance with the dictates of 
Mr. White's classic genius; and depends for its 
beauty entirely upon its proportions and upon the 
warmth of its color. It is — as a college building 
ought to be — a workaday building. Its stairway, 
for example, is not and does not profess to be any- 
thing but a convenient way for boys to get up and 
down. The size of the building is determined by 
the size of the classes required; and the size of 
the windows by the demands for light made by 
modern eyes. The rooms are rectangular, the hall 
spaces are no larger than are needed to permit 

343 



Dedication of Baker Hall 

the dispersal of classes ; and the building is, there- 
fore, economical to heat and to clean. At the same 
time, it provides private offices for instructors, 
which are the envy of instructors who teach in 
more pretentious structures. There are nine of 
these offices, besides nine class-rooms, two labora- 
tories, the museum room, and this auditorium. 
When fully occupied, instruction can be given to 
over 600 students in this building at one time. 
In 1891, when Mrs. Kennedy lent a helping hand 
to the uptown movement by offering her house for 
a parlor meeting, University Heights was only a 
philosopher's dream. To-day, thanks to Mr. John 
Stewart Kennedy, the campus on which this build- 
ing stands, valued at over a million dollars, is 
free of debt ; while t*he buildings already here rep- 
resent another million and a half. We could not 
trade the entire grounds and buildings for one 
model battle-ship; but then we do not want to. 
The two and a half millions are, we believe, more 
permanently and efficiently invested in their pres- 
ent form. 

This Hall of Philosophy is a memorial to 
Cornelius Baker. It thus not only bears an 
honored name, but is by that name linked closely 
with the early history of the university. Mr. 
Baker was not only one of the founders of this 
university, a member of its Council during the 
five trying years 1834-1838, a subscriber to its 
first $100,000 endowment fund, the first donor of 
books to its library ; but was also one of the build- 
ing committee which had charge of the erection of 

344 



Dedication of Baker Hall 

the Gothic building on Washington Square. We 
have no report of that building committee to serve 
as our precedent to-day ; but I learn from the diary 
of the eldest son of Cornelius Baker^ — William 
Edgar Baker, who entered the university in 1833, 
and who was one of three out of a class of twenty 
who completed the course, that when he entered 
in September, 1833 — ''Buildings had not yet been 
erected, but a house in Chambers Street, near 
Chatham Street was used as a temporary accom- 
modation." (In giving courses this year, there- 
fore, in the new Municipal Building, astride Cham- 
bers Street, the university is but re-occupying an 
earlier position.) In 1835, however, William 
Edgar Baker writes — "I commenced my Junior 
year with my class at the University, the building 
on Washington Square being sufficiently com- 
pleted to admit of entering it, which although 
unfinished, we found more commodious than the 
cramped place in Chambers Street. In July fol- 
lowing the University session closed as usual ; but 
the commencement was postponed until the next 
session in October, in order that it might be held 
in the new chapel, which, however, they were not 
able to accomplish, as it was not finished. In 
June 1837 my collegiate studies drew to a close. 
We had our Commencement on the 20th of July 
in the chapel of the university, which having been 
lately finished, this was the first time that it had 
been used for that purpose. According to the 
appointment of the Faculty, I delivered the Latin 
salutatory on that occasion." We have, there- 

345 



Dedication of Baker Hall 

fore, no greater delay in completion to report, 
than the building committee on which Cornelius 
Baker served. 

I learned from this same diary that not only 
was Cornelius Baker a practical business-man, 
serving on the building committee which com- 
pleted the Washington Square Building, in spite 
of strikes, delays, the great jEire of 1835, and the 
financial panic of 1837; not only did he serve 
as Chairman of the Finance Committee and of the 
committee which prepared the plan for the Medical 
School ; but that he was a lover of books, and that 
he supplemented his own education as a young 
man by extensive reading. This appreciation of 
books he handed down to his son, who records with 
exactness in his diary, as he visits the various col- 
lege towns in vacation, the number of volumes 
then to be found in the libraries of Harvard, of 
Amherst, of Dartmouth and of Union. I learned 
too that he was a man of broad civic interests, 
so that when he took a journey for the sake of his 
health in the vacation of Junior year, he tarries in 
Kentucky and calls upon Henry Clay, not hitherto 
known to him, and talks with him of slavery and 
politics. He was a man too of a fine sense of 
duty; so that when his son and other members 
of his family removed to the Spring Street Church, 
which was up town, and nearer their house on 
Greenwich Street, the son recorded — ''My father 
continues at Dey Street, as that church is in need 
of the assistance of some able men. ' ' Of the per- 
sonal appearance of Cornelius Baker, we have the 

346 



Dedication of Baker Hall 

testimony of his grandson, who writes — *'I 
distinctly remember the personal appearance of 
my grandfather Cornelius, who died in 1868, when 
I was twelve years of age. He was above the 
average height, rather slender in build, with a 
wealth of white hair; dignified in his manner," 

Mindful of the important part Cornelius Baker 
played in the beginnings of this university, grate- 
ful for the magnificent legacy of his son-in-law, 
encouraged and enriched by the kindly interest 
and faith in this university cherished by his daugh- 
ter through all the vicissitudes of its history, we 
rejoice that this building is to bear the name of 
Baker Hall. 

The committee was instructed, however, not only 
to build a building which should bear the name of 
Cornelius Baker, but instructed also to build a 
Hall of Philosophy, where the ideals of liberal 
culture in which Cornelius Baker believed might 
flourish and find expression. We have built it 
therefore for Philosophy, but in no narrow sense, 
including with Philosophy, Political Science, 
Sociology, and the sciences of History and 
Economics, upon which Political Science is so de- 
pendent. It has not been our intention to stretch 
the term so as to include all that counted under 
the term Philosophy in the days of Cornelius 
Baker — the subdivisions of Mental Philosophy, 
Moral Philosophy, and Natural Philosophy. 
The accommodation which the Hall of Philosophy 
offers to Biology and Geology is intended to be 
temporary; and these sciences will withdraw from 

347 



Dedication of Baker Hall 

Philosophy's all-inclusive roof, as they have in 
the larger world of thought, so soon as they can 
find for themselves an independent home. 

And yet, as we examine the college world of to- 
day, we cannot but be impressed by the fact, that 
the great task for Philosophy as a college disci- 
pline, if not for a Hall of Philosophy, is a task of 
inclusion rather than exclusion, of synthesis rather 
than analysis. We have been busily engaged the 
last half century in parceling out the field of 
knowledge in small sections, where every part 
may be thoroughly and painstakingly studied by 
specialists. One by one the various sciences have 
fenced in their own ground, and have left Philos- 
ophy's parental roof, building for themselves 
larger and more richly furnished homes. So 
rapid has been the expansion of knowledge that 
the modern student feels lost among so many new 
and extensive buildings, and inquires anxiously at 
each door — "Is this the home of Truth; or can 
you tell me in which house she lives?" We need, 
therefore, for this new city an inquiry desk, a 
bureau of information, and a porter's lodge; or 
as one college president has suggested, we need a 
Professor of Things-in-General, large enough to 
fill the chair which Philosophy once assumed to 
fill. 

Certain it is, that the college needs to-day a 
teacher of values, who will show the significance 
and meaning of various kinds of knowledge, and 
will attempt an answer not only to that modern 
question — ^''What knowledge is of most worth?", 

348 



Dedication of Baker Hall 

but to that older question — "What are the mutual 
relations and relative values of thought and of 
action, of faith and of sight? ^^ No building on 
the college campus therefore, in this day of science 
and of science applied to business and to welfare, 
should play a more important part in shaping the 
world's destinies than a Hall of Philosophy. The 
significance of the American college itself in the 
past has lain largely in the fact that it molded 
a man's philosophy of life. If the college of the 
future is to retain an important place in our 
scheme of education, alongside of schools of ap- 
plied science, of commerce and of education, or 
interpose between high schools and schools of 
theology, law and medicine, it must have men 
qualified to teach a philosophy of knowledge, to 
teach even a philosophy of life ; to teach not dog- 
matically, and yet with authority, as the seer 
revealing a vision, arousing faith, teaching men to 
believe, and believing, greatly to dare. 

The task which the donor and the Council set 
the building committee is to-day complete ; and as 
we report the building ready for final dedication 
to university purposes, we express the hope that 
those who teach within these walls may ever be 
reminded that the windows are large, in order that 
all possible light may enter; the doors are broad, 
open to both East and West, and never to be 
closed to any discoveries in the world of fact, for 
fear the rush of new facts may smother rather 
than fan the truth; that the building stands not 
isolated, but linked by the colonnade with the other 

349 



Dedication of Baker Hall 

buildings of the group, to emphasize the unity of 
all knowledge and the oneness of all who seek 
after truth. It stands, a sort of interpreter's 
house, between the halls both of other peoples and 
other times, and the Library — storehouse of the 
world 's accumulated wisdom, on the one side, and 
the workhouses of scientific research which are to 
add constantly fresh facts to the world's knowl- 
edge, on the other ; and finally, that it stands upon 
a hill, for the purpose that what is done here may 
not be hid, but that what is done here, and done 
rightly, may give light to all that are in the larger 
household of knowledge. 



350 



RELIGION AND EDUCATION 

THE College Board and the Presbyterian col- 
leges of the United States rejoice with you 
in this coming of age of Occidental College and 
the successful ending of its first era. So signifi- 
cant has been its history these twenty-five years, 
so full of promise the new era just opening, so 
cordial the welcome of your sterling president, 
that it seems worth while to have crossed a con- 
tinent to join in commemorating your quarter cen- 
tennial. 

The California of yesterday is more celebrated 
for religion than for education. The religion of 
the missions had little respect for profane learn- 
ing. To the Franciscan fathers of your pastoral 
era, as to many of our business men to-day, the 
whole duty of man might be summed up in the 
words work and worship; a sound creed econom- 
ically, if success may be measured by the tempo- 
rary accumulation and increase of wealth, without 
much concern for the generations to follow. As 
one of your own poets has said : 

"Where are they now, Tower, 
The locusts and wild honey ? 
Where is the sacred dower, 
That the Bride of Christ was given ? 



Address as President of the College Board of the Presbyterian 
Church of the U. S. A. at Occidental College, Pasadena, Cal., 1914. 



Religion and Education 

Gone to the wielders of power, 
The misers and minters of money ; 
Gone for the greed that is their creed — 
And these in the land have thriven. 
What then were'st thou, and what art now. 
And wherefore hast thou striven ? " 

The California of to-day is more celebrated for 
education than religion. We know more of your 
great educational system culminating in your 
great State University, more of your Leland Stan- 
ford, more of Occidental College than we do of 
any cathedral or church which to-day may be try- 
ing to regain for religion the place in the com- 
munity once held by the missions. 

Work and worship were not enough, are not 
enough to-day to perpetuate a civilization. The 
God of the pastoral Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is 
also the God of David the statesman, of Solomon 
the sage, but above all of that Jesus Avho lingered 
in the Temple among the teachers, both hearing 
and asking them questions. No son of man rises 
to the full dignity of manhood who has not some- 
thing of this inquiring spirit. It is this inquiring 
spirit which has built your colleges and universi- 
ties, and has revealed you to the world as sharing 
the joy in existing knowledge and the desire to 
know more, which characterizes all those civiliza- 
tions to which the future seems to belong. 

None of you need regret, therefore, as you look 
back over the sacrifices and struggles of the last 
twenty-five years, the cost in money or even in 
anguish of Occidental College. Certainly the Col- 

352 



Religion and Education 

lege Board does not regret the $30,000 which it 
has had the privilege of transmitting to you from 
the church. As you abandon the old site and to- 
morrow open your splendid buildings, you and 
we, counting the cost and not unmindful of the 
sacrifices of those who are not here to enjoy this 
celebration, may say without reservation: "It has 
been worth it all. ' ' 

You have outgrown the old home, built with 
much care and pride. You have attained major- 
ity, and doubtless are saying with Paul: ''Forget- 
ting what is behind, putting away childish things, 
we will press forward." With that zest for the 
new so characteristic of our glorious American 
youthfulness, we would avoid at all hazards being 
found old-fashioned. This has been a Presby- 
terian college and a Christian college. Is religion 
one of the old-fashioned things to be left behind 
as the college moves to its new home? Shall we 
say, as they say in Japan : ' ' Christianity seems to 
be authoritative up to the university, but he who 
enters the university rises above"? Even in our 
own country there is abroad in the educational 
world to-day a sentiment that religion is a good 
thing for the young, that it is perhaps from the 
politico-economic point of view even a necessary 
thing for the rank and file, if any respect for au- 
thority is to continue in our civilization. In the 
realms of science there is being fostered a sort of 
gentlemen's code, which believes, as one of our 
eastern university presidents has phrased it re- 
cently, that ''a gentleman understands that it is 

353 



Religion and Education 

neither necessary nor expedient to teach to the 
young everything which the experience and reflec- 
tion of an older man may have taught him to be- 
lieve." We are reminded of the esoteric doc- 
trines of India, and of Rome's augurs going about 
their task with a wink for each other. 

There is another group less indifferent to the 
fundamental truths of religion, who think the ques- 
tion is simplified if we define religion as worship, 
and say the schools shall teach but not worship, 
the church shall worship but not teach. The 
church may bow down like the heathen in its 
blindness, but the essential thing is that it bow 
down ; the college will stand erect and do the see- 
ing. 

Both of these doctrines are insidious and per- 
versive. The Lord Jehovah is one God ; He is no 
God of Humbug, but the God of Truth. He is the 
same God for the scientist and for the college 
cook. Democracy is already doomed when its 
leaders whisper in the lobby a different faith and 
a different fact from that which they declaim to 
the people on the platform. Granted that teach- 
ing must be progressive, that there are things 
which even the Divine Teacher deferred telling, 
because His disciples could not yet bear them ; we 
must remember at the same time, that He made no 
secret of His intention, which was to send the 
Spirit which should lead them into all truth. He 
acknowledged no harmful knowledge. With His 
death the veil of the Temple was rent, and religion 
and all truth became not the esoteric possession of 

354 



Religion and Education 

any priestly order, but the House of our Father, 
into which whosoever will may enter. 

But it is said, this is an age of specialization. 
IWhy not then the school for teaching, the church 
for worship? Will not both then be better done? 
But specialization may be carried too far. Simon 
Stylites on his pillar carried specialization in re- 
ligion as far as any one, and we hardly regard 
the result a success. No, religion as we know it 
is a ''way," a method — to use a pedagogical term. 
He that pursues happiness loses it. He that seeks 
religion, as such, withers. 

As Winston Churchill said in an address in New 
York just before I left the coast — a true religion 
demands unity of the soul. We can't have our 
religion one thing and our business another, and 
our scientific beliefs another. Religion, if it be 
true religion, must permeate and energize every 
department of life; the home, the office, the fac- 
tory, the laboratory of the scientist, and the work- 
shop of the literary man, as well as the synagognie 
and the church. 

Whether you will it or not, religion will go with 
you from your old to your new home. Some sort 
of a Weltanschauung will permeate the atmos- 
phere of your new buildings, no matter how good 
the ventilation, before you have been there very 
long. Religion cannot be left behind in the mov- 
ing. The earthem vessel in which we hold our 
treasure may be shattered in moving from genera- 
tion to generation, by some iconoclastic Luther or 
Calvin or Wesley; the Ark of the Covenant may 

355 



Religion and Education 

itself go astray or be profaned ; you may, if you 
will, even destroy the Temple itself, and before 
you can speak of a yesterday, a to-day or a to- 
morrow men will again be pointing their steps by 
something which they hold supremely dear. 

The College Board but reflects the spirit of the 
church which it represents, when it says it is not 
concerned for the form; it is very greatly con- 
cerned for the essence. We want Occidental to 
be Christian, we want Occidental even to be Pres- 
byterian, in the future as in the past. We Avant 
its faculty to believe and to teach that men cannot 
live by bread alone, but need every word that pro- 
ceedeth out of the mouth of God. We want them 
to believe in the sacredness of the individual, and 
to teach that his very hairs are numbered; and 
that, therefore, no man may be used as a thing, 
nor the same laws of economics held applicable to 
wheat and to the laborer who raises the wheat. 
We want them to believe that God is knowable, and 
to teach that He has not left Himself without a 
witness, and that He is revealing Himself to the 
pure in heart, who seek Him. We want them to 
believe and to teach that no calculus of earth's 
chances is complete which stops at the grave, that 
it is not necessarily only the fool or the knave who 
dies a failure on the cross, or ruins his life by 
fantastic sacrifice. We want them to be Presby- 
terian enough to believe in the dignity of the sons 
of God, so that because they fear God and serve 
Him alone, they shall be without fear even of their 

356 



Religion and Education 

own college president. We want them to be Pres- 
byterian enough to believe that God is a Spirit, 
and that worship to be acceptable must not be 
childish, but the worship of the intelligent man 
wise enough to be humble, must be bound by no 
formula of time or place, neither in these Cali- 
fornia mountains nor in our AUeghanies; to be- 
lieve and teach that he who w^or ships the Father 
must worship Him in spirit and in all the fullness 
of all the truth which his Father has revealed to 
him. Ah, if we could have but one college in the 
United States permeated with the spirit of Christi- 
anity at white heat, free with the freedom for 
which our Presbyterian fathers have struggled 
and paid, there would be no need to speak of 
Christian education or to talk of synods or col- 
lege boards. 

And to you, Occidental, we look to work with us 
in your new home as in your old, to realize that 
ideal we have in mind, when we speak of a college 
as Christian and even as Presbyterian. 

Then may it be true of you as of the children of 
Joseph, that not only shall you outgrow this Mount 
Ephraim which is too narrow for you, seeing you 
are a great people, for as much as the Lord has 
blessed you hitherto ; but you shall be able to say, 
''the hill of the land of the Perizzites and of the 
giants is not enough for us, but to us shall belong 
the towns of the Canaanites and the Valley of Jez- 
reel; seeing thou art a great people, thou shalt 
have not one lot only. ' ' 

357 



THE FORWARD LOOKING PRESBY- 
TERIAN 

THE topic assigned to me this evening is ' ' The 
Forward Looking Presbyterian.'^ In the 
early days of Pennsylvania, Presbyterianism was 
the frontiersman's religion. It satisfied and sus- 
tained the new settler, whose hope was in the fu- 
ture. It encouraged individual initiative, inde- 
pendent thought. With God's book in his hand, 
and God immediately accessible in prayer, the 
Presbyterian walked resolutely into the future, 
awaited the coming of the new day without mis- 
giving, secure because of a firm grasp upon cer- 
tain rock-ribbed principles tested by fire and per- 
secution in the years of leagues and covenants. 

We miss something of this independent fear- 
lessness and joyous confidence in our ability to 
deal with the problems of the new day as they 
arise, in the Presbyterianism of to-day. There is 
more talk of holding the fort and standing on the 
burning deck. We speak of the God of Paul, of 
Calvin, of Knox, and forget the teaching of Christ, 
that the fact that God is the God of Abraham, 
Isaac and Jacob, proves that Abraham, Isaac and 
Jacob are of the hving, not that God is a God of 
the dead. 



Address before the Presbyterian Social Union of Philadelphia. 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

There have been periods in the history of the 
church when the highest conception of God was 
a God at rest, a God of dignity who had under- 
gone the labor of creation and who rested in one 
eternal Sabbath. The God which Jesus knew was 
a God of whom he could say, ' ' the Father worketh 
hitherto, ' ' a God from whom proceedeth the spirit 
of Truth which abideth with men, not a little 
while as did Jesus, but forever, teaching all things, 
and guiding into all truth. If the Presbyterian 
looks forward, into the future, with satisfaction, it 
is because he sees God at work there, and is look- 
ing toward God. If the Presbyterian could not 
believe the doctrine of transubstantiation, it was 
not because he did not believe that God could be 
present in the communion but because his God was 
present in so much besides. Like David, alone 
with his flocks, he had found Him on the Scotch 
hills, in the stars, suffusing the firmament, where 
two or three were gathered together, leading the 
fighting clans, consoling the stricken and the dy- 
ing. He could say to God, with the Psalmist, 
God my God, God my exceeding Joy. 

This consciousness of God as Immanuel, as God 
with us, of God as real and present to the individ- 
ual soul without formula and without intermediary 
has been at all times a characteristic of the Scotch 
Presbyterian. It has added a mystical element to 
the life of the stem Presbyterian little understood 
by those who looked only on the outside. And this 
consciousness of God as living with us, as thinking 
with us and in us as a mind which like the human 

359 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

consciousness cannot stand still without disappear- 
ing in coma, has made the Presbyterian skeptical 
of the worth of all tendencies in religion which 
seek to run the molten stream of religious experi- 
ence into fixed molds and to leave them there 
to cool and to harden that the form may not be 
lost for future generations. 

Presbyterianism which began with liturgies and 
directories of worship has, for the most part, been 
too busy pioneering to make much use of them. 
An organization which seeks its genealogy in an 
Apostolic succession rather than traces its rela- 
tion direct to a hving God seems to the Presbyter- 
ian an unnecessary circumlocution. He clings to 
his eldership, presbyteries, synods and assemblies 
but is willing to discuss whether the eldership 
should be for life or a term of years, whether the 
presbytery should be composed of all resident 
clergymen or only those with charges, whether the 
synod should be comprehensive or representative ; 
and whether the assemblies should meet every 
year or every four years. He resists any attempt 
to give him any standardized hymn book and re- 
jects as essentially irreligious the view that when 
the church closed the canon of the scriptures, no- 
tice was thereby served on the Spirit of Grod which 
was to lead into all truth, that his work in the 
world was done. To a church of this mind, the 
forward look has more to show than even the 
backward look. We have no single symbol which 
gathers up the significance of the forward look as 
the cross gathers up and radiates light over the 

360 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

backward look. The key of Peter, the harp, the 
crown, the lamp ; no one of these weighs in signifi- 
cance in the Christian mind comparably with the 
cross. Even John's picture of Jerusalem as a 
perfect city with a perfect city life, significant as 
it is to the modern urban mind, lacks the simplicity 
and unity of the backward looking symbol. The 
future always labors under this disadvantage com- 
pared with the past. In the religion of the 
Jewish church preceding the time of Christ, 
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were much more defin- 
ite figures than the coming Messiah. The law of 
Moses could be much more definitely grasped than 
the exhortations of Isaiah, "Ho, every one that 
thirsteth. ' ' And yet the two factors were always 
present in the Jewish religion, God the Source and 
Creator, God, the Eedeemer and Messiah to come. 
At all times and in all ages there has been a con- 
flict in the philosophic world between those who 
conceived of Being and those who conceived of Be- 
coming as the highest category; between those who 
viewed the world statically and those who viewed 
it in terms of process or movement. In our own 
age it would appear that science has thrown her 
weight with the latter view and the younger gen- 
eration begins to think of what is to be, as more 
important than what is. The younger generation 
is particularly interested, therefore, in forecast- 
ing the future development of Protestant churches. 
To them the significance lies not in ''What have 
you done!" but in ''What do you set before your- 
self as worth doing f'^ Why are we here, means 

361 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

to them not what historical evolution produced us, 
but what picture of a future church, what vision 
of efficient service to coming generations knits us 
together in common fellowship to-day. 

Prophets and seers have not been plentiful in 
America the last generation. Here and there has 
been one who has had a vision of the world evan- 
gelized in one generation. Here and there has 
been one who has had a vision of a Christian state 
characterized by social justice, by intelligence, by 
prevention of poverty. But they have been com- 
paratively few. It has not been an era of cru- 
sades, with all eyes fixed in one direction, with one 
object alone worthy of attainment. 

Soon there may come a great change. Even 
we, in the United States, removed as we are from 
immediate contact with the great world conflict 
raging in Europe, expect to share with the Euro- 
peans in some measure the burden and the oppor- 
tunities of the new era which all believe must fol- 
low the war. Has the Presbyterian church medi- 
tated and wrestled with God as have the men in 
the trenches through the long hours of the night, 
and is it ready to give a strained sinew for a 
spiritual vision and a blessing as the new day 
dawns'? 

The Presbyterian church, perhaps more than 
any other church in modem times, has been closely 
identified with political theory. When the scale 
hung in the balance as to whether Episcopacy or 
Presbyterianism should be the state religion of 
Great Britain, the maxim "no Bishop, no King" 

362 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

turned the scale. When the scale hung in the bal- 
ance in America as to whether there should be 
divorce of church and state, the support of Pres- 
byterians from the North of Ireland desiring 
above all else freedom to worship God, turned the 
scale. The Presbyterian has never been very suc- 
cessful at forgetting on Sundays or at church con- 
ventions what he sees and hears on Saturday at 
political conventions or in congress. The Pres- 
byterians of the South at the time of the Civil 
War tried to bring this fact home to the conscience 
of the Northern church, but without much success. 
Conversely, some Presbyterians would not vote 
in a nation which left God out of its constitution. 
The forward looking Presbyterian therefore will 
recognize in the tirst place that the future of the 
church is bound up in considerable measure with 
the future of the state. Our political theory as 
citizens is likely to re-act on our ecclesiastic theory 
as churchmen. We already see signs of such re- 
action. The movement toward pure democracy 
which has taken place in America the last twenty 
years has found its reflection in the church. The 
old distinction between a republican form of gov- 
ernment and a pure democracy so hotly debated 
by our ablest men in the early days of this repub- 
lic has ceased to have very great significance for 
the average Presbyterian of to-day. So fixed in 
his mind is the doctrine of the utilitarians, that 
every one shall count for one and no one for more 
than one, that when assembled in congregational 
meetings, in synod, or in assembly he feels per- 

363 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

haps unconsciously that the majority may do what 
it will; certainly that the majority may do what 
it will in all matters not covered by specific rules 
of procedure. That the majority favor a given 
course is sufficient warrant for action, and there 
seem to be no restraining principles or recognized 
concepts defining the proper sphere of legislative 
action by which the individual may shape his 
course. The generations which reflected on the 
bounds to be observed in "government by popular 
opinion, ' ' have passed, and their conclusions have 
been forgotten. At recent meetings of the Gen- 
eral Assembly resolutions have been passed which 
violate the Presbyterian theory of the rights of the 
individual conscience and of the proper functions 
of church government. At recent general assem- 
blies, resolutions have been passed without regard 
to whether they lay within the proper province of 
the assemblies or whether the church had machin- 
ery for enforcing the resolutions. In other words 
the Presbyterian church which was distinguished 
from the Puritan and Independent churches of 
England by its regard for institutions and for 
orderly forms of procedure, is in danger of for- 
saking its middle ground and going over from 
republicanism to pure democracy. It prefers the 
democracy of a steel pier as a place of assembly. 
It dechnes to fix those limitations in the number 
of members which would be essential to an efficient 
legislative body. Swayed by orators, it votes two 
ways on the same subject the same week. ' 

As long ago as Aristotle it was pointed out that 
' 364 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

one of the weak points of pure democracy was the 
fact that it could devise no place for the excep- 
tional man. The argument as presented by 
Aristotle was, if the man is exceptional and we 
admit that he is superior to us, we ought to accept 
his guidance. But this would be to be ruled by him 
and not to rule ourselves. Therefore, the only al- 
ternative is to expel the exceptional man if we are 
to remain a democracy. One of the weak points of 
Presbyterianism to-day is its apparent inability to 
find a place of usefulness for the exceptional man. 
Only the man that does things as the majority are 
accustomed to do them, only the man who sees 
things as the majority have been taught to see 
them, can be tolerated. Because, if a man be cast- 
ing out devils, who follows not us, there may be 
some question as to whether authority rests in us 
or in God. This is a danger which threatens our 
colleges quite as much as our churches, the ten- 
dency to decry the exceptional man because he 
will not follow the mob. The absence of a pro- 
per respect for personality may perhaps account 
for the fact that America is not producing her 
share of great poets and authors and for the 
fact that the Presbyterian church when it wants 
an exceptional man so often crosses the border to 
Canada or goes across the ocean to Scotland or to 
England, When by some mischance the church 
finds in a position of influence within its own fold 
a man making a stir in the world because he is 
original, criticism and badgerings begin and the 
inventive spirit finds it easier to do his work out- 

365 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

side the church. This is what philosophers in all 
the ages have recognized as the tyranny of democ- 
racy, and the forward looking Presbyterian will 
stop and ask himself "do I want pure democracy 
in Presbyterianism?" "Shall I lend my support 
to the 'rule of the majority' idea?" "Is the cure 
of democracy more democracy f'^ or "Shall I de- 
fine within somewhat narrow lines, the functions 
of church governing bodies and seek to retain the 
good of democracy without its evil? " 

Another question is one which has been brought 
to a head by the war and by the clash of German 
philosophers with Anglo-Saxon philosophers. 
This is the question, is Christianity a philosophy 
for the world, or is it a philosophy for a select 
few who are to live separate, in a world governed 
by other laws? Are Christian principles applic- 
able to the affairs of the state as well as to the 
life of the individual? Or as Aristotle put it, 
are the principles of goodness the same for the 
good man and the good ruler? Certain prominent 
German philosophers have stated very frankly 
that in their view Christianity is for the individual 
and presupposes the state and the powerful nat- 
ural laws and instincts which operate in the nat- 
ural man. Did not Christ himself say, "render 
unto CsBsar the things that are Caesar's"? This 
question has been brought home to the American 
citizen very sharply the last year in the discus- 
sion over peace and preparedness. And if Pres- 
byterianism is to go forward triumphantly it must 
come to some conclusion on this debated question. 

366 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

There was a time when a large part of the Chris- 
tian church believed that a sharp line could be 
drawn between the affairs of Caesar and the affairs 
of God and that the affairs of Caesar lay outside 
the more immediate province of the Christian. 
With the long continued peace which we have en- 
joyed in America, with the inheritance of our Puri- 
tan forefathers, and with the strong religious 
character of our people, American thought has 
come to identify the two spheres more closely and 
to think of a kingdom of God on earth. There 
are those who say that this dream makes us in- 
efficient in worldly things and compromising and 
spotted with the evil of the world in heavenly 
things. For myself, I cannot see how a church 
which daily prays, ' ' Thy kingdom come, Thy will 
be done on earth as it is done in heaven," can con- 
sistently take any other view than the view that 
God wills the ultimate Christianizing of human 
society here on earth and that it is our duty as citi- 
zens to try and conform our political activity to 
Christian principles as rapidly as we may. To 
my mind there are no greater difficulties theoreti- 
cally in a Christian state than in a Christian in- 
dividual. If aggrandizement, if self-expression, if 
the will to live, if self-interest, must still be the 
controlling principle of the state, it is also a con- 
trolling principle of the great majority of Chris- 
tians in their business life. If the Christian in^ 
dividual can substitute service for aggrandize- 
ment and find it an efficient business principle for 
the individual, doubtless the state can do so with 

367 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

equal success. A very great deal hangs, as you 
will see, on the conclusion which Presbyterianism 
reaches on this momentous question. The whole 
scope and purpose of the church's work will be 
different if Christianity is a philosophy for the 
state as well as for the individual, from that which 
it will be if it is merely a philosophy for the in- 
dividual. 

Another important aspect of the question of the 
church and nationalism, regards the forms of the 
church's organization. Ought the Presbyterian 
church to be as broad as the nation, as high and 
as low as the nation? Ought it to try to reflect 
in its councils the thought of all the states! 
Ought it to try and include in the individual church 
people of all classes in society? General Wood's 
strongest argument for universal, compulsory 
military service is the unifying influence upon our 
national life of requiring all men to do some one 
thing at the same time. Cannot Presbyterianism 
perform a larger service in this direction? It is 
unfortunate that as Presbyterians we perpetuate 
the differences of the Civil War. Few realize 
probably how much unifying influence there is 
merely in the forms of organization and how 
forms of organization tend to isolate those on the 
two sides of the line, so that the leaders of the 
Southern church are hardly known to the leaders 
of the Northern church, much less the rank and 
file. The Presbyterian church has not grappled 
effectively as yet with the question of how it can 
piake itself in truth a national church. It has 

368 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

not solved the problem of how to make the church 
boards national agencies. The Pacific coast 
complains with some truth that the boards of the 
church are largely local affairs. The Forward 
Looking Presbyterian will give some consideration 
to devising boards and councils made up of rep- 
resentatives from all parts of the land. It will 
make provision for leave of absence for a year 
for its moderator, freeing him from any local duty 
so that he may belong for the time at least to the 
whole church, and be free to swing around the 
circle at least as much as the apostle Paul. 

Again, the Presbyterian church, in view of the 
present war, and of the questions which it has 
raised, will set itself with new resolution to the 
solution of the question, ''how can the Presbyter- 
ian church do its part toward enlarging the 
boundaries of loyalty, toward bringing in the in- 
ternational mind, toward bringing in a kingdom of 
God which is not a kingdom of Americans or Ca- 
nadians, or Scotch, or Huguenots, or Reformed, or 
Waldensians, or Hussites, or even Armenians 
or Japanese ; but which will be a kingdom of God, 
our common Father. A step has been taken in 
this direction in the federation of ^ the churches 
holding the Reformed faith, another step in the 
World Conference on Faith and Order, a more re- 
cent step in the Panama conference, but what has 
been done in these ways, has been largely the work 
of great individuals and not a work for which the 
church has officially made provision. If the Cath- 
olic church can survive the antagonisms raised by 

369 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

the war between the Catholic bishops of Belgium, 
Germany and France, it will behoove Presbyter- 
ians to look to their foundations and to ask them- 
selves whether they have built broadly enough for 
the kingdom of God to whose coming they con- 
fidently look forward. 

The Christian church alone holds the key to the 
problem of Internationalism and World Peace. 
Will it use it? Will it teach a divine doctrine of 
sovereignty"? Will it teach the teaching of Christ, 
*'He who would be great among you, let him be 
servant of all"? or will it take the view of the 
so-called Chinese official that Christ, while a great 
spiritual leader of individual souls, knew noth- 
ing of political theory, of economics, or the life of 
the state, and the view of Bernhardi, — ''Christian 
morality is based on the law of love. This law 
can claim no significance for the relations of one 
country to another. Such a system of politics 
must inevitably lead men astray"? 

Whatever conclusion he may reach, the For- 
ward Looking Presbyterian should have, at least, 
as clear cut convictions as these upon the relations 
of nation to nation. 

The Forward Looking Presbyterian, in addition 
to the problem of democracy, the problem of na- 
tionalism and the problem of internationalism, 
sees another question closely connected with polit- 
ical theory which concerns the church. This is 
the question of Woman Suffrage. Women al- 
ready vote in a number of States. The last elec- 
tion showed that a considerable portion of the men 

370 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

of Pennsylvania were willing that they should 
vote in this commonwealth. Even those most 
vigorously opposed to the change, feel that they 
are fighting a losing battle and the most sagacious 
students of society believe that the stars in their 
courses fight for suffrage. This being true, the 
Forward Looking Presbyterian asks himself 
*'How the church of the future will recognize the 
changed relations of the sexes and reflect the poli- 
tical equality of men and women." Even in the 
past, the Presbyterian church has ministered more 
successfully to men than to women as compared 
with some of the other Protestant denominations 
and has made slow progress in organizing the 
energy and devotion of its women as a part of the 
church structure. We have many women teachers 
in our Sunday Schools, but few, if any, women su- 
perintendents. We have church boards and syn- 
odical societies of women, but they are not listed 
as coordinate agencies of the General Assembly 
in the annual minutes, and although allowed, like 
a wife, to hold property in their own name, may 
not invest their own property without the consent 
of the finance committee of the men's board. No 
woman is now eligible to membership on any 
board nor to office in the local church unless it be 
as Sunday School teacher, Parish Visitor, or 
Deaconess, and even the office of Deaconess, recog- 
nized by the church as scriptural, has been, for 
the most part, neglected and not organized in any 
systematic way. The greatest opportunity for 
women has been given them in the foreign field 

371 



The Forward Looking Presbyterian 

where they are permitted to hold appointments 
from the Foreign Board substantially on a par 
with the appointments of men. If the Presbyte- 
rian church looks forward, it must foresee serious 
problems for the church in connection with the 
organization of the religious activity of women 
as a result of the change in the political status 
of women. The Department of Correction in 
New York City has been in charge of a woman 
for a time. The schools of Chicago have been in 
charge of a woman. Only last week it was sug- 
gested that the supervision of all the charitable 
institutions of the State of New York should be 
in the hands of women. The Young Women's 
Christian Association, largely through the help 
of one or two Presbyterian women, have built 
themselves a great organization side by side with 
the Young Men's Christian Association. Even 
the Christian Science church has made a crude at- 
tempt to solve the problem of the sexes in the or- 
ganization of the church, while Catholicism, even 
in its earlier days, as we all know, gave to woman 
recognition in its theology. The Presbyterian 
church, if it is to be the church of the future for 
our college women as well as for our college men, 
cannot afford to shut its eyes to changing condi- 
tions. 



372 



THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT IN EDUCATION 
— A NECESSITY 



w 



HEN the great Jowett was Master of Bal- 
liol, the Jowett of whom the rhyme ran 



"My name is Jowett, 

I 'm Master of Balliol College, 

What there is to know, I know it. 

And what I don't know, isn't knowledge," 

one of his students in a conference on Philosophy 
one Smiday said: *^ Master, I have been studying 
the arguments for the existence of a God, and after 
considering the matter thoroughly, have been un- 
able to find sufficient grounds for belief in a God." 

"Young man," said Jowett, "if you don't find 
a God of some kind before Monday night, you go 
down. ' ' 

Now that was an instance where the religious 
element was a necessity in Education, but in a 
little different sense from that intended by your 
committee. And yet Jowett was right, because, 
whether he chooses it or not, consciously or un- 
consciously, every man who is a student at all, 
every man who thinks to any degree, has a God of 
some sort. 

The student may be a devotee at the shrine of 
reality. Trained in scientific method, taught for 
years that inaccuracy is the great sin, encouraged 



Address at First Methodist Churcli, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 1916. 

373 



The Religious Element in Education — 

to deny his hopes and desires, striving to rid him- 
self of old preconceptions, and personal prefer- 
ences, and to wait humbly at his microscope, at his 
test tube, at his telescope, for the reahty that may 
be revealed, gradually there has grown up in his 
soul a religion, the worship of Truth, the abhor- 
rence of error, and consciously or unconsciously 
he worships *'the God of things as they are." 

Or consider a man of artistic temperament 
strangely stirred by harmonies of sound or of 
color, filled with ecstasy by the shadings of a sun- 
set or the proportions of a Parthenon or soothed 
in blissful rapture by the cadence of an Ovid or 
a Keats, his soul revolts at all that is distorted, 
abrupt, unlovely, it seeks out and basks in the 
beautiful, and consciously or unconsciously wor- 
ships Beauty, sacrifices all for Beauty, and for- 
gets the sacredness of human life, and the signifi- 
cance of homely joys and sorrows. To him ''the 
Glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was 
Eome," become the ''regions which are Holy 
Land. ' ' 

Or the Will rather than the Heart or the Intel- 
lect may be the dominant force of the man. He 
may have discovered that when his will comes into 
conflict with other wills, his will can override. 
He begins to enjoy the satisfactions of power. He 
looks about for more worlds to conquer. He asks 
what are the most effective tools. Why did this 
man win in this case ? Why did this man triumph 
in the election, that man go down to defeat ? Why 
was this man chosen to a fraternity, that man re- 

374 



A Necessity 

jected? Was it because of his check book, then I 
must reenf orce my natural will power with a check 
book. Was it because of social graces, then I 
must cultivate social graces. Was it due to some- 
thing beyond my reach, heredity, blood; — then I 
must plan for my children what I cannot hope to 
win for myself. And he worships at the throne of 
the Great God Success, and sends his missionaries 
over a thousand seas, that they may magnify his 
power. 

What is it to have a God? To have something 
that your soul clings to, that is, to it, the supreme 
reality, that is alone worth while. 

Religion in this sense is a necessary element in 
Education, because whether we will have it so or 
not, our hopes, our desires, our valuations, irre- 
sistibly arrange themselves in order, and one and 
another are subordinated, and one becomes su- 
preme. 

But religion involves another factor, than su- 
preme love or highest valuation. It involves sub- 
ordination. 

To be religious you must be able to say, some- 
thing or some one is greater than I, and to say it 
consentingly, not rebelliously. The scientist as a 
rule has this humility, this reverence. The unde- 
vout astronomer, it is said, is mad. The great 
physicians feel it toward the mysteries of life. 

The great artists have it, because they are con- 
scious of how far short their performances fall 
of the beauty even which they imagine. 

The man who worships success is not likely to 
375 



The Religious Element in Education — 

have it. He trusts in his own right arm, his own 
clever brain, his own purse. 

The college boy is not likely to have it, because 
he is in the first flush of youth, he feels new life 
pulsing within him, the future is his, he knows 
nothing as yet of the limitations of his environ- 
ment, or the bitterness of defeat. If he worships 
a God, it is likely to be a God like the God of the 
Psalmist, who fights on his side, a fellow victor, for 
whom the fight is the thing, the lust of conflict; 
not in a God who gives or expects personal help, 
or a God who is too exacting or one likely to lay 
much stress on salutes or polite recognitions from 
brother fighters. 

I heard two mothers discussing the other day, 
which were the mser course, to let the young child 
grow up in the glorious bravery of ignorance, free 
of all fear of dogs, ready to stroke or to pull the 
ear or tail of any dog it sees, protected certainly 
in some measure by its very assurance, or to teach 
the child a mistrust, even a fear of dogs, that it 
may exercise caution in approaching strange ones. 
We who have to do with children of a larger 
growth, hesitate over a somewhat similar ques- 
tion. Shall we mar youth's confident belief in its 
own powers, and so cripple somewhat his energy 
and force, in order to drive home the lesson of 
submission and dependence, or shall w^e leave this 
element of religion to make its appearance when 
experience demands it I 

A boy becomes a man, not when he discovers his 
own powers, and feels his freedom, but when he 

376 



A Necessity 

discovers the limitations of his life. A boy may 
graduate from college without ever knowing 
physical hunger, or having discovered what a driv- 
ing force the necessity of having food and of hav- 
ing it now, may be. A boy may graduate from 
college without ever having found himself in a 
completely helpless condition or even having ex- 
perienced the sensations of one about to drown, 
or of one lost in a fog. A boy may graduate from 
college without ever having known a desperate 
and unavailing remorse. And a boy may not 
only graduate from college, but may go out into 
the world and live a score of years without ever 
having forced on his attention by the death of any 
one near to him, or his own serious illness, the fact 
that man has not forever, that his part in the 
great glorious universe, whether it be to him a 
universe of truth, of beauty, or of power, is but a 
passing one of relative insignificance. 

These are some of the reasons that make it 
difficult to give religion its proper place in col- 
leges. 

Did you ever take the ordinary hymn book and 
go through it, to see how many hymns there are 
which could have been written as the sincere ex- 
pression of the soul of the normal healthy college 
boy, or which portray attitudes of mind which you 
would like to inculcate at that age, if you could? 

We have a different preacher at Lafayette every 
Sunday, and about every third preacher, out of a 
collection of a thousand hymns feels driven to 
select ''The Son of God goes forth to war." 

377 



The Religious Element in Education — 

But if you cannot expect that feeling of depen- 
dence, of the need of help, which forms so large a 
part of the religion of those who are younger, and 
of those who are older, to be a very large element 
of the religion of the college boy, you can secure 
something of the same result, and give the boy 
a religious consciousness by leading him to see 
the reality of inexorable law. 

In a different sense from that of Paul, the laiv 
is the school-master, for the college boy of to-day, 
to lead him to Christ. 

His training in modern science prepares him 
for a belief in inexorable law in other fields, for 
a belief in himself as a subject of law, for a vision 
of himself as part of a divine scheme of things. 
As his knowledge of other fields grows, he begins 
to question whether after all it is not braggadocio 
to declare, "I am master of my fate," ''I am 
captain of my soul," at any rate outside narrow 
limits. If he thinks of the ordered universe of 
which he recognizes himself to be a part, as a uni- 
verse of matter, as essentially unthinking, without 
heart or conscience, as a great machine of which 
he is a cog, and of human emotion, hope, fear, and 
desire, as efflorescences, as insignificant in the real 
march of events as the bleat of the lamb about to 
be slaughtered, then his awakening to the realiza- 
tion of law is an awakening to find himself a 
prisoner. If, on the other hand, he awakes to a 
broader vision of law, a vision of an ordered uni- 
verse in which the hopes, and fears, and desires of 

,^78 



A Necessity { 



men are an essential part of the scheme of things, 
not human error, and weakness, and delusion, but 
the highest fruit of the orderly universe that he 
knows, then he is ready for religion out of his own 
experience, and then if ever the educational pro- 
cess must be ready to step in and interpret and ex- 
plain and illumine the minds groping after God, 
and supply a divine explanation of souls and 
things. 

Alfred Noyes as the young man's poet has 
taught this more and more in his last poems. 

* ' Only the soul that plays its rhythmic part 

In that grand measure of the tides and sun 

Terrestrial and celestial, till it soar 

Into the supreme melodies of heaven, 

Only that soul climbing the splendid round 

Of law, from height to height, may walk with God, 

Shape its own sphere from chaos, conquer death, 

Lay hold on life and liberty, and sing, 

"Glory that would be glorious ^ I 

Must keep thy law to find its own, 
Beauty that would be beautiful 
Must keep thy law to find its own, 
Might that would be omnipotent 
Must keep thy law to find its own, 
And mercy that is merciful 
Shall keep thy law and find its own. 
Thy law, thy law is liberty 
And in thy law we find our own." 

But some perhaps feel that when your college 
379 



The Religious Element in Education — 

boy has awakened to a conception of law dominant 
in the universe, he is farther off from God than 
before. 

When every shaking tree, every bubbling spring, 
every fleeting cloud, might hide an arbitrary in- 
dividual will, man had little difficulty in finding 
a God. With a universe immeasurably extended, 
with a knowledge of impersonal forces and rela- 
tions so universal as to overshadow individual 
spirits, can we still show God to the immature and 
bewildered college boy? Especially can we still 
show a good God, can we still show a moral pur- 
pose in the universe, can we still show that right 
wins, that right has cosmic significance, that ''this 
universe is not dead and demoniacal, a char- 
nel house with specters but Godlike and our 
Father's"? 

This is the great question which religion and 
religious instruction must answer for the college 
boy. Huxley, high moralist that he was, took the 
pessimistic view, you will remember, that "what 
is ethically best, involves conduct which in all re- 
spects is opposed to that which leads to success in 
the struggle for existence." The college boy na- 
turally wants to be on the winning side. He wants 
to guess right. He wants his judgment to be in 
accord with things as they are. He is willing to 
take a knightly chance, to go through trial and 
suffering, and defeat, if need be, to see his reward 
postponed. He does not reject the search for the 
grail as an unreasonable use of life. He is ro- 
mantic. He is brave. He is sentimental. But 

380 



A Necessity- 
he does not want to show ignorance, he does not 
want to choose wrong. 

Is, then, right forever on the scaffold, wrong 
forever on the throne? Does it recompense a 
man hereafter to be good, or are goodness and 
success alternatives? These are questions which 
must be answered for the student, not only by 
the formal teacher of religion, but also by the 
institutional life of the college. 

If the Christian college is not willing to apply 
Christian principles to its institutional life, it can- 
not hope to make them principles of action for its 
students. If any man is qualified to serve as trus- 
tee no matter what his moral life, provided only he 
have money enough, the college is teaching more 
forcibly the worship of the God Mammon than 
could any course in the curriculum. 

If the college says to its teachers, hold your 
tongue, preach no new doctrines either in reli- 
gion or in economics, lest you jeopardize good 
gifts, it is eloquently teaching a doctrine very 
different from the doctrine of Jesus. On the other 
hand, if it says to its professors, we will main- 
tain you as teachers, provided you teach what you 
think is truth, regardless of its effect in the lives 
of men, it is a very different doctrine from that 
which says, ''it were better for him that a mill- 
stone were tied about his neck, and that he should 
be cast into the sea, than that he should cause one 
of these little ones to offend.'^ 

The religious element in education is a necessity, 
yes. But you will not succeed in teaching a reli- 

381 



The Religious Element in Education — 

gion very extensively to your students, unless it is 
a religion which you are willing should take and 
operate your institution. 

If we can be sure when we organize a college, 
that we are two or three truly gathered together 
in the name of our divine Lord, we may be sure 
that there will be God in the midst, and that all 
that we do will be to His honor, and will proclaim 
the presence and the practice of God. 

In scholastic circles we are perhaps prone to 
overemphasize the intellectual side of religion. 
To think of religion as knowledge. To sum up 
religion in texts with the verb to know. 

' ' This is life eternal that ye may know. ' ' 
' ' Ye shall know the truth. ' ' 

The past generation has undoubtedly both in 
its national psychology and national theology, ex- 
alted the intellect unduly above the will. What 
has been true of the nation, has been doubly true 
of the college student. Agnosticism is the appro- 
priate disease of a religion which emphasizes 
knowledge to the exclusion of conscience, which 
forgets the categorical imperative, and the Thou 
Shalt of the divine. 

No education is complete which does not restore 
the imperative to its rightful place in the con- 
sciousness and appreciation of the student. Com- 
mands admit no verdict of doubtful, not to obey 
is to disobey. 

To the elements added by religion to the stu- 
dent's complete equipment, which I have named 

382 



A Necessity 

knowledge of relative values, cordial submission 
to a higher power, the recognition of law and of 
the binding force of the imperative, we may add 
finally the mystic or devotional element of re- 
ligion, or what has been called the practice of the 
presence of God. 

The omnipresence of God is a fact which nine 
tenths of all students believe theoretically. It is 
a fact which does not have practical significance 
in the lives of one tenth. Here is a rich heritage 
into which the twentieth century student can enter, 
to a degree, not possible for the student of the 
nineteenth. What religion was to Enoch, of whom 
the scripture says, ''He walked with God," 
religion may be to the student of to-day because 
Philosophy, Science, all the trend of modern 
knowledge make it easier for us to think of God 
as immanent in the world than to think of Him as 
apart from it. 

God's favor and our American optimism have 
led us to catch glimpses of the possibiKty of the 
divine in human affairs, and to pray with more 
faith, Thy kingdom come on earth. The teacher 
of religion in our colleges to-day cannot do better 
than to repeat Paul's address to scholars that they 
should seek God, if haply they might feel after 
Him and find Him, though He is not far from each 
one of us, for in Him we live and move and have 
our being. This then is the supreme contribution 
that religion can make to the college man, as it is 
the supreme end of liberal culture. The end of a 
liberal education is to make a man at home in all 

383 



The Religious Element in Education 

the world of knowledge and of men. The end of 
religion is by making man sensible of his divine 
origin, and being, to make him ready and able to 
interpret God's voice speaking in his own spirit, 
to prepare him to be at home both here in his 
Father's creation, and after a time also in the 
mansions prepared within his Father's house. 



384 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

THE American nation is to-day taking stock. 
It is performing 'the task mnch more 
thoroughly than for many years. Stirred by the 
upheaval in Europe which burst upon us so un- 
expectedly, rendered thoughtful by the discovery 
that the America of to-day is not identified with 
the ideals which hold first place and claim a first 
allegiance with many of her citizens; sobered by 
the realization that the daily press is a, very im- 
perfect pair of spectacles for discerning important 
and significant events, the American has decided 
to stop a bit and look around him, to do a little 
listing of stock on hand on his own account and a 
little figuring to see how assets stand as against 
liabilities. Preparedness of one kind and another 
is in the air, — not .military preparedness alone. 
Capital and labor are preparing for the great 
struggle which they foresee. Newspapers are 
laying in their stock of local color. Politicians 
are taking in a reef here, or shaking out a reef 
or two there, ready for the breeze. Speculators 
are cashing in, for their own benefit, the nation's 
vision of good times coming, and those, who like 
the prophetess Hulda of old, dwell in the colleges, 
interpret to those who inquire, the ancient writ- 
ings as a warning to the present, holding out the 

Address before the Ministers' Association of Philadelphia, 1917. 

38? 



The Christian College 

cold comfort that "because of your tender heart, 
ye shall be gathered to your graves in peace and 
shall not see the evil that is to come upon this 
place. ' ' 

To a world thus taking thought of the morrow, 
education appears as important a factor as muni- 
tions to the general in the trenches. Education 
is not a subject of interest to the man who must 
have his results to-day. It is not even a subject 
of much interest to the man of wider vision when 
the machinery of the world is working smoothly 
and sons are found prepared to carry on the work 
of their fathers as a result of the established 
routine. But to men who see a new era about to 
begin, a new era likely to mark as great and sig- 
nificant a change in thought as the renaissance, 
the reformation or the French revolution, the 
future looms large, and they ask, who are the men 
of this new future, from what schools are they to 
come, what steps are being taken even now to pre- 
pare them for the task which awaits them? 

As a nation, Americans have always believed 
in education. Whether we judge by their words 
or by the budgets of state and municipal govern- 
ments, the evidence is not wanting that education 
holds a first place in the affections of the American 
citizen. Expenditures for schools is the largest 
single item in the budget of all our great cities. 
In Pennsylvania, no less than in our great west- 
em states where the flame of American life burns 
so intensely, the state gives generously to higher 
education. We may safely say therefore that the 

386 



The Christian College 

increase and dissemination of knowledge occupies 
a foremost place among American ideals. 

We believe with Jefferson that "Knowledge 
must forever govern ignorance, and that a people 
who propose to be their own governors must arm 
themselves with the power knowledge gives." 
The American state creed begins "I believe in 
Man," quickly followed by "I believe in Educa- 
tion. ' ' But to urge the importance or significance 
of education before a company of ministers is to 
waste time. Ever since John Knox prescribed 
for the local parish a teacher of Latin side by side 
with the parish minister, Presbji;erians especially 
have been friends of education, and it would be 
diflBcult in many instances to tell whether the 
school or the church would claim first place in the 
affections of Presbyterians should occasion arise 
to choose between them. 

Taking for granted therefore that the interest of 
this body in education in general is quite as great 
as that of the average citizen, and assuming that 
your interest in higher education is somewhat 
more than that of the average citizen, may I ask 
your attention to one phase of the college prob- 
lem? Colleges have a deeper significance to the 
thinking man than any other form of educational 
enterprise, because it is from the colleges that the 
leaders of thought go forth, and thought eventu- 
ally determines action. To this we are all agreed. 
But some of us will part company and certainly 
we will all part company with a large number of 
our friends, when we ask, whether we can mold 

387 



The Christian College 

the character of a college or so shape its ends or 
its destinies as to determine the Christian char- 
acter of its product, and make it a useful instru- 
ment for the advancement of God^s Kingdom, 
without thereby injuring its character as a college. 
Special regard has been paid to the doctrine of 
laissez faire of recent years, not only in the world 
of economics, not only in the world of individual 
education, but also in the institutional world. We 
have been disposed not only to leave the individual 
child free to develop his own personality, but also 
to leave the institution free in its corporate exist- 
ence to develop from within or to become the 
football of circumstance as the course of human 
events might determine. In a time of upheaval 
and change, the voice of authority has become 
strangely silent and diffident. We have wanted to 
test everything in the light of our own brief ex- 
perience, to put everything, from the Ten Com- 
mandments down, into the test tube to see if they 
will not yield to modem reagents. We have been 
disposed to reject external authority not only for 
the individual but for the institution. 

We have gone to the extreme of individualism, 
we have been disposed to throw overboard even 
our belief in * * children of the covenant, ' ' our faith 
that ''the promise is to you and to your children," 
at least so far as institutions are concerned, and 
to say the history and antecedents, the blood re- 
lations of a college have nothing to do with defin- 
ing its Christian character. Individual repen- 
tance and confession, with works meet for repen- 

388 



The Christian College 

tance, are the only index of institutional character. 
Some have even gone so far as to urge that as 
ministers' sons are proverbially bad so the 
church's colleges are the last place to look for 
pure religion. Some even question whether a 
classification of colleges according to their Chris- 
tianity, supposing that we could determine their 
Christian character, would be a significant class- 
ification to the father about to send his boy to 
college. At Oberlin thirty years ago no student 
was permitted to board at a house in the town, 
where daily family prayers were not maintained. 
Not many of us, however, would select our board- 
ing house by the devotional quality of its prayers, 
rather by the wholesomeness of its food. 

To most of us the distinction drawn in Enghsh 
households between Church of England and dis- 
senting servants seems far fetched. To most of 
us, the distinctions now being drawn between pro- 
German and pro-ally servants in American house- 
holds seems far fetched. We do not expect to taste 
in a pudding, the flavor of Scotch Irish Presbyteri- 
anism, or to find the quality of an omelet affected 
by high or low Anglicanism. We sleep as com- 
fortably in a bed made by a pro-German as in a 
bed made by a pro-ally, and find the radiator 
equally hot or equally cold, whether the stoker be 
German or Italian. Evidently then some char- 
acteristics of the physical, intellectual or spiritual 
man affect the particular product, others do not. 

Some accordingly argue, there is no Christian 
mathematics, there is no Christian biology, there 

389 



The Christian College 

is no Christian physics. What I want my boy to 
get at college are the facts ; truth is truth wherever 
taught. If the faculty are concerned for the in- 
crease and spread of Christianity, I fear truth may 
be perverted. In other words, the college will not 
be as much of a college if it is Christian as it will 
be if it is just college. As the average American 
prefers to have public schools teaching secular 
learning without religion, rather than not to have 
the secular learning for his children, so there are 
many who argue in this age of specialization let 
us have colleges that are schools, and churches 
that are churches, but let us not confound the two 
lest we have both an inferior school and an in- 
ferior church. 

The question how can you ensure the Christian 
character of a college, must be answered the same 
way as the question how can you ensure the salva- 
tion of your son or daughter. Some things you 
can do to this end; the final outcome is in the 
hands of God. If of the very Temple itself of 
which it was written My house shall be called a 
house of Prayer, it might be said but ye have made 
it a den of thieves, we cannot expect to find the 
Christian college more sacred. The spirit of God 
makes the college Christian, and the spirit of God 
is like the wind, it bloweth where it listeth. It is 
no new discovery, therefore, to say that the col- 
lege which according to certain external charac- 
teristics would fall in the class of Christian col- 
leges, may on closer examination, at any time, be 
found to be less Christian than another college. 

390 



The Christian College 

But because there is no infallible rule for assur- 
ing the salvation of our children, shall we there- 
fore throw around them no safeguards, take no 
care for their moral and spiritual education, but 
leave them to develop unhampered by us accord- 
ing to their physical inheritance and the environ- 
ments in which they are thrown ? Shall the church 
merely preach and leave it to the individual church 
members to put in practice the teaching as it re- 
lates to education in the same way in which it 
leaves it to individual church members to put in 
practice the preaching of the church as it relates 
to business? 

Why is it that schools and colleges are any more 
the business of the church than counting houses 
and factories? Obviously, because the church 
itself professes to be in the teaching business. 
Because it claims not only the right to teach but 
claims the subordination of all other teaching to 
its teaching. Because it claims for itself the most 
important branch of knowledge, What is God? and 
what duty does God require of man? A teacher 
itself, a teacher which claims subordination of all 
other knowledge to its knowledge, it cannot re- 
main indifferent to the rest of the educational 
process. If the church will cease appealing to the 
intellect of man, and appeal only to his aesthetic 
sensibility, to his imitative instinct, to his love of 
mystery, to his emotions, it may perhaps safely 
ignore the college. But so far as the Presbyte- 
rian church is concerned when the Presbyterian 
church forsakes the appeal to the intellect,, no 

391 



The Christian College 

Presbyterian church will remain. With no priest- 
hood, no liturgy, no miraculous sacraments, it has 
tried to live solely by and for the divine truth it 
had to teach. When it ceases to teach, or to be 
interested in the teaching of its youth, it will have 
become something other than that we know as 
Presbyterian. 

What can the church do, what can anybody do, 
toward the determination of the kind of secular 
education our boys are to receive, toward the de- 
termination of the conditions under which they 
are to receive it ? Why should the church as such 
found any colleges and how far, having founded 
them, is it helpful to go in controlling them? 

The church founds colleges first as a part of its 
mission of enlightening the world. This is one 
reason why we found them not only in America 
but also in China, Syria, India. In the early days 
the church in America founded colleges to pro- 
vide itself an educated ministry, and still the 
church draws its supply largely from its own col- 
leges. Secondly in a broader sense, the church 
founds colleges, because the general law holds 
good here as elsewhere. Give and it shall be given 
you. The church which sows education, intelli- 
gence, leadership, shall reap education, intelli- 
gence, leadership, whether it protects the crop 
with a mortgage or not. The church which casts 
its bread of education upon the waters shall find 
it after many days in most unexpected places, and 
at most opportune times. The Episcopal Bishop 
of Bethlehem found it hard to get workers for his 

392 



The Christian College 

diocese. He started a hospice under his immedi- 
ate care, where students might prepare for col- 
lege and live while at college. Friends of the 
church gave him scholarship aid for the men, and 
he told me last fall that this httle personal hobby 
of his would at the present rate soon more than 
supply all the workers his diocese can use. Not 
only that, but he is himself bigger and happier 
because he has multiplied himself in his disciples. 
As the old proverb says, he who pays the piper 
calls the tune. Whether the relation of the church 
to the college be legal or historical, immediate or 
indirect, the creature will bear the stamp of its 
creator. A college is first of all a piece of ground 
and a shelter, loaned, rented or owned, secondly 
money to support teachers and scholars, while en- 
gaged in teaching and study, and thirdly a com- 
munity of persons, few or many, teachers and 
taught. All the rest is incidental and accessory. 
The character of the institution in the long run 
will be determined more by the selection of the 
men who teach than by any other factor or con- 
dition. If the church is interested, therefore, in 
insuring its Christian character, let it make sure 
of the character of the teachers, and the rest will 
follow. A department of Bible, important and 
desirable as such a department is, will not make a 
college Christian, which is pagan in its department 
of Greek or agnostic in its department of Geology. 
That is one reason why it is so idle to talk of 
maintaining a complete divorce of secular and re- 
ligious education in America. Though the word 

393 



The Christian College 

religion be never mentioned, by virtue of the warp 
and woof of the teachers' character, the schools 
will be either predominantly Christian, or Jew- 
ish or agnostic as the case may be. 

The business of the Christian college is not so 
much to teach religion as to teach science in a re- 
ligious spirit. The school is not a substitute for 
the church. There is something subtler than a 
textbook, more effective than regulations and laws, 
and that is personality. The personality of the 
teacher determines the character of the school. 
No matter what the subject, whether Cicero or 
calculus the man behind the teacher shines 
through. The student learns to admire the man 
and admiring the man he forms his ideals and 
opinions according to his model. 

And if we can shape our college so that it will 
be Christian, what will it do for us? No one, I 
fear, knows, because the ideal we have in mind 
has never been realized in its perfection. But we 
have caught glimpses of what such an institution 
might mean to us, to the church, to the world. We 
should see it combining the knowledge of the 
school with the inspiration and enlightenment of 
the church ; we should see it teaching values, chart- 
ing directions, giving prophets and seers to our 
generation. Even under present conditions, if 
soldiers are wanted, those in authority look to the 
colleges, if peace pilgrims are wanted those in 
authority look to the colleges, if the Standard 
Oil Co. wants men for China it sends its agent 
to the colleges, if the National City Bank wants 

394 



The Christian College 

men for South America, it sends to the colleges, if 
the Church wants missionaries, it sends its agent 
to the colleges, if we would promote civic reform 
we appeal to college men, and whether it be a 
good lawyer, a skilled physician, an able engineer 
that we want, we have learned to demand the col- 
lege man as raw material from which to fashion 
him. 

''Are we preparing ourselves as a nation in 
intelligence f asks Dr. Coffin. "Leadership 
among the nations requires an unusual amount 
of brains. The late Bishop of London, Dr. 
Creighton, told his countrymen some years ago, 
'true patriotism consists in desiring to be wiser. 
If we perish, we shall perish of sheer stupidity 
from which we show no desire to deliver our- 
selves, ' and he held up to them their two favorite 
policies, the pohcy of Muddle and the policy of 
Dawdle." "Divorce religion and education," 
says Josiah Strong, ' ' and we shall fall a prey 
either to blundering goodness or to well schooled 
villainy. ' ' 

Some way, some how, some where, as we take 
stock for the future of America, we must make 
provision for that ideal college, where knowledge 
shall be exact and complete, character robust and 
gracious, and Christianity not only a welcome 
guest, but the ruling spirit within its walls. 



395 



A NEW WESTMINSTER 

IN rising to-night to respond to the toast of 
' ' The Founders, ' ' after having been the unwill- 
ing cause the past week of a good deal of pro- 
test and turmoil among the friends of Westmin- 
ster, I am reminded of a saying which was cur- 
rent some years ago in New York, — ''The New 
York Tribune, Founded by Horace Greeley, Con- 
founded by Whitelaw Reid." I sincerely regret, 
Gentlemen of the Alumni, that the peace and pros- 
perity of Westminster should have been even 
slightly disturbed by any act of mine. Though a 
comparative newcomer among you, I yield to none 
in my concern for the welfare of Westminster, 
and in laying down the office of president at this 
time, I do so only because compelled to the step 
by a duty which I cannot disregard. Any con- 
founding or confusion which such an act may occa- 
sion will I am sure speedily pass away and be for- 
gotten and I ask you all to-night to believe with 
me that in the providence of God before the time 
comes for the change of administration, Westmin- 
ster will have found a man who will do for her all 
and more than any of us could even have hoped 
to do. 

It is one of the great consolations vouchsafed to 

Founders' Day address, Westminster College, Fulton, Mo., Feb- 
ruary, 1903. 



A New Westminster 

the man who works for an enduring institution 
like a college, unlike the man who works as an 
individual, that however brief may have been his 
work, and however small a part he may have ac- 
complished of that which he has attempted and 
hoped, his work does not stop when he lays down 
the tools, but is taken up by another hand, and 
goes on through generations. As we meet to- 
night to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of 
Founders' Day we can not only say with Webster 
''the past at least is secure," but with large- 
hearted faith and with prophetic vision of the im- 
portance and magnitude of the work in which we 
are engaged, rest in the well-grounded belief that 
Westminster College is too great an enterprise to 
be dependent in any considerable measure on this 
man or that. 

At the recent meeting of the Association for the 
Advancement of Science in Washington, the Pres- 
ident of the Department of Physical Science, Prof. 
William S. Franklin, was discussing the definition 
of Physics, and in conclusion said, ''I think that 
the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student 
gets it, is that it is the science of masses, molecules 
and the ether; and I think that the healthiest 
notion, even if a student does not wholly get it, 
is that Physics is the science of the ways of tak- 
ing hold of bodies and pushing them." However 
accurate a definition of Physics that may be, it 
seemed to me when I read it, an admirable defini- 
tion of the college presidency. Prof. Franklin 
thinks it perhaps too deep for ready comprehen- 

397 



A New Westminster 

sion as a definition of Physics, and as applTed fo 
the presidency it will bear carefnl study and 
analysis, but I commend it to you as worth bear- 
ing in mind, and trust that Westminster will find 
a man who is an adept in ' ^ the science of the ways 
of taking hold of bodies and pushing them. ' ' And 
since to-night as Alumni and Trustees you con- 
front the necessity of inaugurating a new epoch 
at Westminster, it is well that the completion of 
the half century turns our thoughts back to the 
founders of the institution, and that we are thus 
led to consider what were the motives and ideals 
which influenced our fathers to assume the burden 
of planting and nurturing a new institution, to 
the end that we upon whom their mantle has fallen 
may comprehend more clearly the work in which 
we find ourselves engaged. 

The great characteristic of the Puritans, Sen- 
ator Beveridge once said, may be expressed in 
three words, ''Build, Build, Build." They had a 
genius for construction, for founding, and it is 
true in general that the man who is born into a 
time of revolution and reformation in religious 
and political faiths, or who as a pioneer maps 
out a new civilization, and is forced therefore, in- 
stead of taking things on trust to think them out 
for himself, going clear back to first principles, 
if he be of sufficient intellectual vigor to carry 
through the task, and not become stranded on the 
sandbar of doubt, and if with intellectual vigor 
goes moral vigor, courage to follow where truth 
and duty lead, naturally plans his life on a larger 

398 



A New Westminster 

scale. He is likely to reject current appraisals 
and to weigh things and forces at their true value. 
Living in the light of first principles, sub specie 
aeternitatis, he is not content with the dazzling 
baubles of to-day, but seeks the enduring, is not 
content to limit himself to a small circle but 
handles by preference the mightiest forces which 
operate among men. 

Some such consciousness of forces which though 
unseen are eternal, shaping, controlling, directing 
the destinies of men, is as a rule present in the 
minds of men like the Founders of Westminster 
College. They themselves may be but dimly con- 
scious of such motives. The immediate needs of 
the community, the needs of their sons and daugh- 
ters, the financial benefit derived by the town from 
the location of the college, the need of the church 
of an educated ministry, these motives may be the 
more obvious ones. And yet if you examine more 
closely the men who do the large things for educa- 
tion, in nine cases out of ten you will find this 
constructive mind, this ambition to handle large 
forces, the desire to leave one's impress not on a 
family or a town, but on a state and country, not 
on a single generation but on centuries. 

Our own age presents a curious paradox. Side 
by side with an intense materialism, a firm belief 
in money as a good, and as an incomparable power, 
lives and flourishes an equally strong Idealism — 
a belief in the power of thought, of ideas, to trans- 
form and control mankind. It is this materialis- 
tic age of ours which has seen Kitchener attempt 

399 



A New Westminster 

that most idealistic of educational enterprises, the 
planting of a college at Khartoum — within the dec- 
ade the home of the howling dervish. It is our 
own age and in a region where we should expect 
to find materialism rampant^ in mining camps and 
at the jumping-off places of the world, that we 
see spring up a scheme of education which some 
call visionary, and some the fruit of consummate 
insight and wisdom. 

Here is a man who has been an empire-builder. 
Who has handled nations as a child does his 
blocks. Who has changed the map of the world. 
Who did not scruple to use armies to accomplish 
his ends when other means failed. And when he 
comes to die, and is concerned for the carrying 
out of the great dreams for which his own life- 
time is all too short, what instrument does he call 
to his aid? Not armies, not commercial indus- 
tries, not brute force, not wealth as such, but the 
apparently ineffective school teacher. The great 
man of affairs, the man who has lived strenuously 
among men, admits that after all the mightiest 
forces in civilization are the forces of education, 
and Cecil Ehodes testifies by his will that his 
dream of world-wide empire and world-wide peace 
are to be sought if at all, through the shaping of 
the ideals and lives, while still in a plastic period, 
of the young men, who are to be the intellectual 
leaders of their respective races. 

We find it hard in our modem civilization to 
escape from the overwhelming consciousness of 
the greatness of the world of things. Nowhere is 

400 



A New Westminster 

this thought borne in upon ns with greater power 
than when we watch the buildings of a great 
World's Fair fill with the innumerable products 
of industry and art from the four quarters of the 
globe, and yet man is greater than the things he 
makes. When the psalmist surveyed man amid 
the works of nature, he exclaimed, ''What is man 
that thou art mindful of him?" but viewing man's 
work in such a great exposition our minds are 
directed rather to the second part of the psalmist's 
thought, ''Thou madest him to have dominion over 
the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things 
under his feet," and impressed with the greatness 
of man, we ask that question which Socrates re- 
garded as the question par excellence, "If mak- 
ing good shoes is what makes a shoemaker a good 
shoemaker, what is it which makes a man as a 
man good — when is a man as a man of the highest 
class, what would be ideal man?" Proud indeed 
may the states of the Louisiana Purchase be of 
their empire building, of their commercial enter- 
prise, of their farms, their mines, their manufac- 
tures, their beautiful homes, their stately public 
buildings. All these indicate a citizenship cap- 
able beyond measure in those industrial pursuits 
without which the most splendid civilization is im- 
possible. But what has been the product of this 
territory this hundred years in the highest spheres 
of human endeavor? Has it had its share of great 
poets, great preachers, great statesmen, great au- 
thors, great teachers, great prophets? Is it not 
true that the very wealth of tlie goil has so lured 

401 



A New Westminster 

men to money making, has so accustomed its citi- 
zens to luxury and ease in return for slight expen- 
diture, that unlike rocky, frugal New England it 
has hardly produced its quota of men of great 
minds, willing and able to wrestle with great ideas 
and to penetrate with spiritual eyes heavenly vis- 
ions? 

How and where shall such minds be trained on 
these rich prairies inviting to intellectual indolence 
and earthliness of life, and thought? In large part, 
gentlemen, they will be nourished in the small col- 
leges like Westminster. Escaping the dangers of 
riches, idealism will there abound, the life will still 
be held more than meat, and man of more import- 
ance than the complicated civilization in which he 
has clothed himself. Nourished continually by the 
inspiration of the thought of God, and by the 
heavenly wisdom of His word, the eternal verities 
will not be obscured by an omnipresent opportun- 
ism. While the loneliest places in the world, it is 
true, are great cities, and there the soul which 
wishes may dwell apart, and shut out the world 
which is likely to be too much with us, while you 
may be a hermit in a city like Diogenes as well as 
in a desert cavern, yet the city hermit is too likely 
to be misanthropic and cynical. So gigantic and 
overwhelmingly great is the society of men about 
him, oblivious to his truth and yet happy and 
successful, that after honestly battering for a 
while without effect upon the impervious armor 
of this world-wise mass, he confesses his weakness 
and impotence, by dipping his arrows in the venom 

402 



A New Westminster 

of satire and bitterness. While the thinker who 
lives nearer to nature and in a simpler society, 
who sees seed time follow harvest and the laws of 
God work out inexorably though it take genera- 
tions for their fulfillment, launches his truth clear- 
eyed and confident, content if it be but cast upon 
the waters of the world's thought. 

The benefits which flow from such an institution 
as Westminster College are not merely those 
which come through her teachers and her sons. 
There must be counted also the benefits to society 
through the creation of a higher life and interest 
among her patrons. It has been one of the glories 
of our free America, that men have been free to 
interest themselves directly in these lofty enter- 
prises, as individuals. When the state as a state 
takes them in hand, while theoretically it makes 
it possible for a greater number to interest them- 
selves in the promotion of these higher things, 
practically there is danger that with the growth 
of a bureaucracy, education will become a matter 
of professional mechanism rather than of individ- 
ual enthusiasm and faith. 

The law of interest is a reflex one. Not only 
does one spend in proportion to his interest but 
his interest is also in proportion to his spending. 
There is danger therefore that were education 
purely a state affair, supported by taxes which 
we do not feel directly, an interest and regard for 
the higher purposes of education would not be 
widespread. Just as interest in a church is less 
when it is a state church, than when it is a church 

403 



A New Westminster 

for which we pay the bills, and for which we select 
the minister. 

Gifts to education are like mercy, blessing both 
him that gives and him that takes. May the great 
exposition then force home on the men of St. 
Louis and Missouri the thought as to what is to 
be the end and purpose of all our luxurious civili- 
zation. Is man to become a slave to things'? 
Shall wealth breed only wealth? Or has not the 
time come to set apart a portion of this wealth 
that by means of such endowments Missouri may 
both invite men within its borders and may keep 
within its borders its own sons, who are willing 
to give their lives to these higher employments 
of the mind which are the crown and chief glory 
of the ripest civilization! 



404 



GEOEaE TAYLOE— PATEIOT 

TO get into the Hall of Fame, a man must have 
been dead ten years. To become enshrined 
in the hearts of his countrymen, he must have been 
dead a hundred years. It is not without prece- 
dent that we should gather here two hundred years 
after his birth to do honor to George Taylor. 
The statute of limitations runs against the law, 
*^A prophet is not without honor save in his own 
country," and the prophet often secures a tardy 
recognition even in his own country when one or 
two centuries have elapsed. 

It is a sign of health in a community when it 
cherishes its local history. "Eemember the days 
of old, consider the years of many generations," 
said Moses. The community which looks a long 
way backwards, is generally the community also 
which looks a long way forward. It is worth- 
while then to turn aside even in these strenuous 
times, to place a portrait of George Taylor, the 
Signer of the Declaration of Independence, here in 
the Easton Public Library. Easton has not been 
without memorials of the famous citizen — the 
shaft in the cemetery was unveiled a half century 
ago, and his residence, that quaint house on Fourth 
Street, is still carefully preserved by the Daugh- 

Address at the unveiling of a portrait of George Taylor, Easton 
Public Library, 1917. 

405 



George Taylor — Patriot 

ters of the American Revolution. And to these 
is now to be added this portrait authenticated with 
such painstaking care. 

We all wish doubtless that we had a better 
mental picture of the man the artist has sought 
to portray. The outlines of his history are 
familiar to all of us. He was one of that great 
company of sons who, like the present President 
of the United States, owed his philosophy of life 
to a ministerial father. Destined for the medical 
profession, restlessness, love of adventure, am- 
bition, or some cause of which we know nothing, 
drove him to give up his studies and come to the 
new world. Too poor to pay his passage, he ar- 
rived in Philadelphia, a boy still in his teens, in 
debt to the ship. Mr. Savage, proprietor of 
Durham furnace, ten miles below Easton on the 
Delaware, needed a boy to shovel coal, and was 
glad to pay the passage money, and take the boy 
under contract to work out the sum. The Irish 
boy must have ''had a way with him,^^ for he soon 
became clerk of the works, and when Mr. Savage 
died a few years later in 1738, the young appren- 
tice of 23 married the widow, and as manager of 
the furnaces rose to a position of responsibility 
and prominence in the community. Later, he 
bought a farm at what is now Catasauqua, but 
soon sold it and settled in Easton. He handled 
the moneys for the erection of the Court House, 
was made a Justice of the Peace, was chosen to 
represent the county in the Provincial Assembly. 
We know little of his personal character. A 

406 



George Taylor — Patriot 

signer of the Declaration of Independence, he was 
a slave owner and did not hesitate to sell a 
crippled slave for $75. After the death of his 
wife, he took his housekeeper for his mistress, 
and when he died divided his estate equally be- 
tween his legitimate and illegitimate heirs. He 
was reputed a fine man and a furious Whig. He 
had courage, he had foresight, he had a lively 
sense of justice. Nothing perhaps reveals his 
character more clearly than the remonstrance he 
addressed to the Grovernor of Pennsylvania be- 
cause no steps were taken to punish those guilty 
of the massacre of a number of Indians in 1768. 
"There is a manifest failure to justice some- 
where," said the Committee. "It must be either 
from debility or inexcusable neglect in the execu- 
tive part of the government to put their laws in 
execution. ' ' 'What seemed a presumptuous act in 
peace time even for a man of 52, and doubtless an 
unpopular one, convinced all that he was just the 
man in 1777 to try and negotiate a treaty with 
the Indians to offset the attempt of the English 
to use them in the Revolution. And he sat as one 
of the Commissioners in the old Third St. Church, 
among the braves for that purpose. He had fore- 
sight. When a member of the Provincial Assem- 
bly, he was made a member of the Committee on 
Defense, and he did not wait until war was de- 
clared, and three or four months after, before 
urging the ordering of cannon balls, and the drill- 
ing of men. If he had lived in our day, he would 
doubtless have been charged as a munitions maker, 

407 



George Taylor — Patriot 

with favoring war for his own profit. He had, in- 
deed, at first some profitable government con- 
tracts, but at that time he was only a partner in 
the business, and the other partner and owner of 
the property decided for the Tory cause, and the 
furnace was sequestered by the Oovernmeijt, and 
Taylor lost his chance of a fortune. 

We do not know how much he had to do with 
swinging sentiment in Pennsylvania in favor of a 
break with England. He was not a member of 
Congress on July 2, 1776, when the Declaration of 
Independence was passed, and Pennsylvania was 
swung into the affirmative by only a narrow 
margin, but before the Declaration had been en- 
grossed and was ready for the complete signatures 
in August, George Taylor had been elected, and 
was ready to add his name, and risk his neck for 
Independence. And he signed the famous paper, 
as a late comer, with a small modest signature 
down in the lower right hand corner. 

We know little of the part he played in the 
Revolution. He was already a man of 60 when he 
signed the Declaration, but he was not too old to 
act as a signal officer or intelligence officer of 
the Government, and keep watch of the British 
fleet over in New Jersey. He did not live to see 
the Revolution crowned by success by the sur- 
render of Cornwallis, but died in 1781 at the age 
of 65, having already outlived both wife and son. 

It is a strange hour for us to live again the 
scenes of that Declaration. The traditional atti- 
tude toward England, in which we were reared, 

408 



George Taylor — Patriot 

has given place, under the compulsions of a com- 
mon menace, to the closest and friendliest rela- 
tions. Unity, not independence, is the watchword 
of the hour. Any fellow Irishman of George 
Taylor's who to-day should raise his voice against 
England's King, would at once be mobbed as un- 
patriotic. "We are rather glad that Congress 
would not adopt Jefferson's original draft of the 
Declaration which spoke of the last stab given to 
expiring affection, and the duty of forgetting all 
love to our unfeeling brethren in England. 

And yet there are points of similarity between 
the war of to-day and that of 1776 against the 
Hanoverian King. As Trevelyan says, ''Save 
and except for the system of personal government, 
which George the Third had laboriously built up 
ever since 1760 Americans and Englishmen would 
not have been slaughtering each other in 1776." 
The King's policy, like the Kaiser's, caused the 
war, the King, like the Kaiser, kept it going long 
after everybody except himself was weary of it, 
and in 1782 that war was terminated against his 
will, as this war will be against the will of the 
Kaiser, by nothing except a peremptory injunction 
from the English people, who if they had been 
properly represented in Parliament, as in the case 
of the German people to-day, would have brought 
it to an end long before. 

There was as great difference of opinion in this 
country as to the wisdom of the Declaration of In- 
dependence, as there was as to the wisdom of the 
declaration of war against Germany. Dr. Wither- 

409 



George Taylor — Patriot 

spoon, of Princeton, said then, as many say now, 
that the country was not only ripe for Independ- 
ence, but was in danger of becoming rotten for it. 
The country was so long making up its mind that 
the very day John Adams made the decisive 
speech, which caused him to be hailed as the Atlas 
of Independence, he wrote a letter to Samuel 
Chase, describing the time spent in the debate as 
wasted, because nothing was said but what had 
been repeated and hackneyed in that room a hun- 
dred times over for six months. The arguments 
for Independence which had weighed with the peo- 
ple were not lofty, idealistic or theoretical. As 
the historian says, 'Hhere was one Tom Paine 
who knew if men are to fight to the death, it must 
be for reasons which all can understand, and in 
the name of Common Sense he argued that Amer- 
ica would flourish as much and probably much 
more if no European power had anything to do 
with her Government. She gained no profit from 
the English connection and she suffered in her 
dignity. A greater absurdity could not be con- 
ceived than three million people running to their 
sea coast every time a ship arrived from London, 
to know what portion of liberty they should en- 
joy. The period of debate is closed. Arms 
in the last recourse must decide the contest. A 
new era for politics is struck. A new method of 
thinking has arisen. All plans and proposals prior 
to that nineteenth of April, when the embattled 
farmers stood at Lexington, are like Almanacs of 
last year.^' 

410 



George Taylor — Patriot 

We have no Tom Paine to put this war of ours 
into plain English — no engrossed parchment for 
prominent Rotarians to sign, except Liberty Bond 
subscriptions, and Red Cross memberships, and 
here and there an enlistment card. But truths 
outlast the centuries. If Independence was worth 
fighting for then, it is worth fighting for now. If 
it was true then, that all men are born free and 
equal, and are endowed with certain inalienable 
rights by the Creator, then it is true now, and no 
Kaiser has the right to use men against their 
own best interests for his imperialistic purposes. 
If it was true then, as Lafayette declared with the 
approval of George Washington in a later Declara- 
tion of Independence that he drew up, that ''there 
are natural rights so inherent in every man's ex- 
istence that all society united has not the right of 
depriving him of them, among them liberty of 
opinion and the communication of thought in every 
possible manner, ' ' then it is true to-day, and Dem- 
ocracy no more than the Kaiser can be justified 
when it violates inalienable rights on the plea of 
military necessity. 

We do well to celebrate George Taylor. He 
was probably regarded as a rather wild and con- 
tumacious Irishman in his day, but his faith in a 
greater freedom for men was justified by the 
event. We shall do well to profit by his example, 
to remind ourselves that the obvious is rarely the 
right course, that easy going compromise in high 
places often fails to do even handed justice, and 
deserves rebuke, that docility to constituted gov- 

411 



George Taylor— Patriot 

emment is not necessarily a virtue, but that for 
the great privileges of freedom of speech and ac- 
tion, whether it be freedom from the outrageous 
interference of a Kaiser, from the thoughtless 
tyranny of democratic majorities, or from the in- 
solent presumption of well organized minorities 
it is praiseworthy to risk reputation and life it- 
self. 

When the Jubilee of Independence was cele- 
brated July 4, 1826, the year of Lafayette's visit 
and of the founding of the college in his honor, 
they tried to arrange a meeting of the two surviv- 
ing founders of the Eepublic, John Adams and 
Thomas Jefferson, but the meeting was not in this 
land of freedom for which they had done so much, 
but on that glorious Fourth those two heroes both 
tasted for the first time the free air of that other 
country, where the whole truth makes men free 
indeed, and they need no light, not even Liberty's 
torch, to enlighten their world. 

But before John Adams set out for that coun- 
try, they asked him for a toast that they might 
offer at the Fourth of July banquet. "I will give 
you," said he, ''Independence forever." ''Will 
you not add something to it?" he was asked, and 
the noble old statesman replied, "Not a word." 
To-night in the midst of a world war of independ- 
ence, and in honor of George Taylor, and I am 
sure, with his approval, could this portrait speak, 
I give you the same toast and battle cry, "Inde- 
pendence forever!" 



412 



THE LESSON OF VALLEY FORGE 

PERHAPS no picture of the Revolution is more 
firmly fixed in the minds of the American 
people than the picture of Valley Forge in that 
cruel winter of 1778. 

Whether it is because, as Trevelyan suggests, 
nations, like readers of fiction, love a sad story 
which ends happily, — or because all nations de- 
mand something of personal asceticism in their 
heroes, — or because Valley Forge was the crisis 
in the career of that great general whose fame 
gathers luster with the passing years, and who 
remains to-day for all American, first in war, first 
in peace, and first in the hearts of his country- 
men^ — I shall not attempt to say. In any event 
this fair hillside beside the charming Schuylkill, 
which borrowed in those early days a name from 
the local foundry, has become a world famous 
shrine. A character was hammered out on the an- 
vil of the forge that bitter winter into the immor- 
tality of undying fame, and Valley Forge, as time 
goes on, bids fair, in the opinion of the observant 
English historian, to be the most celebrated en- 
campment in the world's history. Whatever the 
future may bring. Valley Forge is to-day one of 
Pennsylvania's proudest possessions, and in ask- 

Addresg before the General Assembly at Valley Forge, May, 
1920, 



The Lesson of Valley Forge 

ing you to share with us its beauties and its pre- 
cious memories, we are asking you to partake of 
our best. 

Valley Forge commended itself to Washington 
as the site for his winter camp, first because the 
rising ground made it possible to render the camp 
impregnable against any sally which might be at- 
temped by the British troops in Philadelphia; 
secondly, because it was near enough Philadel- 
phia to confine the raiding expeditions of the 
British to a narrow area and preserve rural Penn- 
sylvania for the American cause ; and thirdly, be- 
cause it was readily accessible from York, the seat 
of Congress, and from the Moravian settlement 
of Bethlehem, where the general military hospital 
had been located, and commanded an open road to 
both New Jersey and to the sea. Apart from 
these reasons, there was little to commend it as a 
place of winter residence. The Marquis Lafay- 
ette, writing to his young wife, January 6, 1778, 
said: ''Powerful reasons are requisite to induce 
a person to make such a sacrifice — as to spend the 
winter at Valley Forge in barracks scarcely more 
cheerful than dungeons, ' ' and yet Lafayette found 
those powerful reasons, and as late as June 16th, 
writing to Madame Lafayette from Valley Forge, 
he said, ''The opening campaign does not allow 
us to retire. I have always been perfectly con- 
vinced that by serving the cause of humanity and 
that of America, I serve also the interest of 
France." Would that Valley Forge might con- 
vince the Presbyterian church to-day that by serv- 

414 



The Lesson of Valley Forge 

ing the cause of humanity and the cause of sister 
nations and denominations, she serves also the in- 
terest of America and of true Presbyterianism. 

Perhaps one reason that Valley Forge has such 
a hold upon the imagination of Americans is to be 
found in the list of the personages that played a 
part upon this stage. George Washington was 
soon joined at Valley Forge by Martha Washing- 
ton, and here through the dark winter days she 
cared fpr officers and men, so that an observer 
recorded **I have never known so busy a woman." 
Here was Mad Anthony Wayne, the Pennsylvania 
surveyor, much at home in his native country. 
Here was General Nathanial Green and his wife, 
who made it the rule through the long winter days 
that no one who had a good voice should be al- 
lowed to refuse to sing. Here was not only the 
Frenchman Lafayette — one of the few men whom 
Washington could trust implicitly, but also the 
Prussian drillmaster von Steuben, who had re- 
fused splendid offers from the Emperor of Ger- 
many, determined never to draw his sword again 
except in the cause of liberty, and who threw 
himself so whole-heartedly into the task of turn- 
ing raw recruits into seasoned troops, that his 
leaven was soon felt throughout the American 
army. Here too was Light Horse Harry Lee 
learning the art of war with his dragoons, and un- 
consciously preparing to shape the destinies of 
the Republic through the still more famous son, 
who came to him when he was past fifty, and 
whom he named Robert E. Lee. 

415 



The Lesson of Valley Forge 

But it is not a picture of fair women or great 
leaders which we associate first with Valley Forge. 
It is rather a picture of bleeding feet and of 
barren stretches of snow marked with the red 
streaks of blood. It is a picture of emaciated 
men, drawing their belts tighter and huddling 
around a fire through the night watches, because 
it was too cold to lie down to sleep without 
blankets. It is a picture of generals sharing the 
privations with their troops and of troops remain- 
ing loyal to their general, in spite of intrigue in 
the political world without, in spite of cold and 
hunger, lack of clothing and no pay. 

To this period history has given the name, 
"The Winter of Discontent.'' Washington's 
fame stood at its lowest ebb, he was subject to the 
criticism even of such men as John Adams, and his 
enemies well-nigh succeeded in driving him from 
the public service. John Adams indeed expressed 
the hope ''that Congress would elect their gener- 
als annually, and then some great men would be 
obliged at the year's end to go home and serve 
the nation in some other capacity not as necessary, 
and better adapted to their genius." The Penn- 
sylvania Legislature lectured Washington for re- 
tiring into cantonments among the luxuries of 
Valley Forge. It was the time of Washington's 
supreme trial, and we prize Valley Forge and the 
snows of Valley Forge as the Jews prized the 
fiery furnace and the lion 's den of their Danielj be- 
paiise here the moral fiber of those Americau men 

416 



The Lesson of Valley Forge 

and of their leader was made manifest under the 
severest tests. 

Americans have drawn many moral lessons 
from Valley Forge. Endurance of privation and 
bodily hardship without complaint, loyalty to the 
nation's leader, patience under what seemed a 
policy of unwarranted delay, and even cowardice 
— these are some of the lessons which every school 
boy knows. But we who are older ought to look 
deeper. We have been taught to believe that the 
sufferings at Valley Forge were due to the poverty 
of the revolutionists, and to the severity of the 
winter. Trevelyan shows clearly that the suffer- 
ings were due primarily to the mistakes made by 
the representatives of the people in Congress the 
preceding summer. It is not generally known 
that the lack of supplies was due principally to 
the fact that Congress, by interfering with the ad- 
ministration of Colonel Trumbull, a competent 
Commissary General, had driven him and his as- 
sistant, the Quartermaster General, from the pub- 
lic service the previous summer, and that the 
office of Quartermaster General remained unfilled 
from September, 1777, to April, 1778. The Com- 
mander-in-Chief himself had warned Congress 
that ''military arrangements, like the mechanism 
of a clock, must necessarily be imperfect and dis- 
ordered by want of a part." It was not poverty, 
it was not the severity of the winter, it was pri- 
marily the failure of Congress to appoint and trust 
a Quartermaster General, that left the Continental 

417 



The Lesson of Valley Forge 

Army without shirts or shoes, at Valley Forge, 
while hogsheads of raiment and footgear lay spoil- 
ing at different places along the roads and in the 
woods. 

Armies do not feed and clothe themselves spon- 
taneously, and neither do nations — as the Russians 
are learning to their cost, and as this nation will 
soon learn through bitter experience, unless they 
profit by the lesson of Valley Forge, and place a 
higher premium on the services of great leaders 
and intelligent experts in a democracy. America 
has had warnings enough of the impending short- 
age of food and fuel next winter, yet paralysis 
binds our governmental machinery, and heedless 
of the lessons of Valley Forge, we hasten toward 
a winter of suffering and mutual recriminations. 
Republicans and Democrats alike scan the horizon 
for the approaching dark horse who is to save 
the nation, and at the same time, men go up and 
down and to and fro through the nation belittling 
their leaders, sowing distrust, stirring up envy, 
and fettering, in every way in their power, the 
effectiveness of the strong men who would give 
their services for the public weal, if we would but 
trust them. 

America has now, as it had at Valley Forge, a 
winter of discontent. Cabals are as ripe as they 
were in Conway's time. Good men are as be- 
wildered as was John Adams. 

We must look to the men of the churches to 
preach a gospel which will temper and inspire 
our patriotism with that spirit of love ''which 

418 



The Lesson of Valley Forge 

seeketh not her own, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth 
not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth, which 
hopeth all things, endureth all things, believeth 
all things." And at length the long Winter of 
Discontent will break for us as it broke at Valley 
Forge, the glad news of the signing of a treaty 
in Paris will come to us as it came to the watchers 
at Valley Forge that May day in '78; the petty 
jealousies and machinations of Congress which 
have cost the nation the services of competent men 
will be overwhelmed, and the nation will follow a 
chosen leader into the dawn of a new day wherein 
dwelleth righteousness. 

We do well to revisit the altars of national sacri- 
fice; to rekindle our faith in national leaders; to 
remind ourselves of the price at which our liberty 
was purchased; and to resolve that these dead 
shall not have suffered and died in vain. The 
Pilgrim Fathers who sought afar freedom to wor- 
ship God, quickly forgot how precious a boon they 
had attained, and drove out the Quakers and 
burned their witches. We Presbyterians, the 
children of those Scotch-Irish who in the days 
of constitution making stood firm for the doctrine 
that that government is best which governs least, 
must recover our faith in the individual, must 
stop looking to legislation as a universal panacea, 
'must again raise our voices for individual free- 
dom and initiative, against the onsweeping doc- 
trine of pure democracy and mass tyranny. We 
shall do well, as Mr. Latimer suggests, to take as 
our campaign slogan, DO IT YOUESELF, and 

419 



The Lesson of Valley Forge 

clinch our argument by such stirring instances as 
that of Dr. Burke, who has given us here such a 
remarkable example of what one man can do. 
We, who like Washington love and admire Lafay- 
ette, must remember that Lafayette was the most 
consistent individualist and believer in human 
freedom that the world has ever known (unless 
it was He who walked in Galilee). The faint- 
hearted Americans of this generation who muzzle 
the press, who distrust the people, who would 
license education, who would bind their Samsons, 
behead their John the Baptists, stone their 
Stephens, and imprison their Sauls, should come 
to this shrine of Valley Forge, and in prayer 
and fasting ask themselves what Valley Forgo 
would have been without Washington, what Wash- 
ington would have been without Lafayette and 
von Steuben, what Valley Forge might have been 
if Colonel Trumbull had been left free to work with 
Washington. After the cruel tyrannies enforced 
by war, we need a new birth of freedom, a new 
baptism with the spirit of Lafayette, a new em- 
phasis on the teaching of Christ, Ye shall know 
the truth and the truth shall make you free. 

Let uS/OiTthis consecrated ground, undismayed 
by the Mistory of the past five years, unite again 
in the prayer. Thy kingdom come, the kingdom of 
righteousness and peace and joy, let us pray with 
Elisha, ILord, open the e^es of the young man that 
he mayisee the horses and chariots of fire about 
us. \ 

' THE END 

420 




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